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Month: July 2015

The Omnibus Volumes of Murray Leinster

The Omnibus Volumes of Murray Leinster

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Med Ship-small Planets of Adventure-small A Logic Named Joe-small

Last week, in my article on The Omnibus Volumes of James H. Schmitz, I noted how Eric Flint edited seven omnibus volumes collecting the science fiction of James H. Schmitz, starting in 2000. Those books were successful enough that Eric expanded his project to include other great SF and fantasy writers of the mid-20th Century.

And boy, did he expand it. By the time he was done, Baen had published volumes dedicated to A. E. Van Vogt, Michael Shea, Howard L. Myers, Keith Laumer, Randall Garrett, Christopher Anvil, Cordwainer Smith, Lois McMaster Bujold, A. Bertam Chandler, P.C. Hogdell, Andre Norton, and many others. Today I want to look at the three volumes dedicated to Murray Leinster, “The Dean of Science Fiction,” whose work I think still has enormous appeal even today.

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Vintage Treasures: The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories

Vintage Treasures: The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories

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The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories-small The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories-back-small

The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories is one of the oldest paperbacks I own. It is, in fact, one of the oldest fantasy paperbacks produced in the United States. It was published in 1941, just two years after Pocket Books released the first paperbacks in 1939, revolutionizing the American publishing industry. And like a lot of old things, it’s a little strange and doesn’t do things in a familiar way.

For one thing, as it was one of the first paperback anthologies ever produced, apparently no one thought the name of the editor was important. Some folks assume it was W. L. Parker, who wrote the intro, and others assume W. Bob Holland, but no one is really sure.

Also, it’s called The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories not because it contains The Haunted Hotel (by Wilkie Collins) and twenty-five more stories about ghosts, but because it’s actually a mash-up of two previously published books: the novel The Haunted Hotel (by Wilkie Collins), and Twenty-Five Ghost Stories. So naturally, the page numbering re-starts halfway through the book. In the early days of paperbacks, publishers were trying all kinds of wacky things. Except original titles, apparently. Because, hey, let’s not go crazy.

And another thing. Have a look at the strange back cover (click for a bigger image). Today, we think of the back cover as, you know, a great place to tell prospective buyers a little about the book in their hands. In 1941, you mostly told readers what the hell a paperback book was. You imparted critical information, like “opaque paper,” “delightful flexibility in handling,” and “stained on all three sides with fast book dyes.” It’s easy to mock the primitive publishers of 1941 today, but let’s face it — if they hadn’t sold their early readers on paperbacks, you and I would be reading books exclusively in hardcover and clay tablets.

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Bill Ward on Poul Anderson’s “Thud and Blunder” — Thirty Years Later

Bill Ward on Poul Anderson’s “Thud and Blunder” — Thirty Years Later

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Swords Against Darkness III-smallNearly seven years ago, Bill Ward wrote “On Thud and Blunder — Thirty Years Later,” one of the first articles ever posted at BlackGate.com. Here’s what he said, in part.

It’s been thirty years since Poul Anderson wrote his essay on the need for realism in heroic fantasy, ‘On Thud and Blunder,’ which you can read in its entirety at the SFWA site, and I think it holds up well even though the genre — and the perception of it — has changed greatly. ‘On Thud and Blunder’ originally appeared in the third installment of Andrew Offutt’s classic anthology series Swords Against Darkness; though it was in the excellent, if unimaginatively named, collection of Anderson’s called Fantasy that I first encountered it. But already at the time of my reading a whole generation of writers had made a name for themselves by following the dictates of realism and common sense in designing their fantasy worlds.

The essay begins with a satire of the genre that features a barbarian cleaving through armor with a fifty-pound sword and riding a horse as if it were a motorbike, among other ridiculous things. It’s the kind of thing that gave heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery a bad name, and perhaps the sort of thing that meant it would soon be eclipsed by a rising tide of ‘high fantasy’ in the eighties and nineties. But, in 1978, hf — as Anderson terms heroic fantasy in an abbreviation that seems to have never caught on — was an emerging star.

In the Comments section, James Enge wrote, “Thanks for this: I’m a big Anderson fan and it’s a pleasure to reread this article… it’s still the authentic points of concrete imagination that strike deep, and Anderson was a past master at those.”

Read the complete article here. We’ll be presenting more classic articles from BG‘s rich history over the next few months.

Apex Magazine #74 Now on Sale

Apex Magazine #74 Now on Sale

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Apex Magazine Issue 74-smallCongratulations to Ursula Vernon, whose story “Jackalope Wives” (Apex 56) won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story! Charlie Jane Anders at io9 called it “the most beautiful story I’ve read in ages.” Check it out here.

Columnist Charlotte Ashley reviews the Hugo Award short fiction nominees this month in her short fiction column in Apex #74, and she address the controversy head on:

I will not be coy and pretend I do not know that the contenders for this year’s Hugo Awards are controversial. The nominees in, especially, the short fiction categories have mostly been drawn from the “Rabid Puppies” slate: stories chosen to reflect the values of a vocal ideological minority in fandom, often published by them directly. These are stories that were largely unfamiliar to most readers of speculative fiction until very recently.

I intend to vote in the Hugo Awards, and while I am well aware that voting “No Award” in the face of a slate offered in bad faith is an option preferred by many of my peers, I prefer to make my decisions armed with well-informed reasons for my choices. I have opted to read the slates with a generous attitude, to determine for myself if there are any hidden gems in the corners of SFF that I have unfairly overlooked.

“On A Spiritual Plain” by Lou Antonelli (Sci Phi Journal #2) is definitely not that gem. This is a straight-forward piece about a Methodist minister posted to a remote outpost on the planet Ymilas. The local aliens are a “low-tech highly-ritualized” people who live alongside the ghosts of their dead, called “Helpful Ancestors.”…

Read the compete article online here.

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Future Treasures: The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard

Future Treasures: The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard

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The House-of-Shattered-Wings-smallI’ve been a fan of Aliette de Bodard since the publication of her Aztec mystery novels, collected in Obsidian & Blood, so I was thrilled to have the chance to meet her at the Nebulas last month. She is articulate, funny, and absolutely charming in person, and I’m very excited about her upcoming fantasy novel, The House of Shattered Wings, to be published by Roc next month.

Aliette has won the Nebula Award (twice), the Locus Award, and the 2010 British Science Fiction Award, and has been nominated multiple times for the Hugo. The House of Shattered Wings is set in a devastated Paris ruled by fallen angels, and tells a tale of the War in Heaven, divine power and deep conspiracy…

In the late twentieth century, the streets of Paris are lined with haunted ruins, the aftermath of a Great War between arcane powers. The Grand Magasins have been reduced to piles of debris, Notre-Dame is a burnt-out shell, and the Seine has turned black with ashes and rubble and the remnants of the spells that tore the city apart. But those that survived still retain their irrepressible appetite for novelty and distraction, and The Great Houses still vie for dominion over France’s once grand capital.

Once the most powerful and formidable, House Silverspires now lies in disarray. Its magic is ailing; its founder, Morningstar, has been missing for decades; and now something from the shadows stalks its people inside their very own walls.

Within the House, three very different people must come together: a naive but powerful Fallen angel; an alchemist with a self-destructive addiction; and a resentful young man wielding spells of unknown origin. They may be Silverspires’ salvation — or the architects of its last, irreversible fall. And if Silverspires falls, so may the city itself.

The House of Shattered Wings will be published by Roc on August 18, 2015. It is 402 pages, priced at $26.95 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version. The cover art is uncredited.

A Brief Guide to Space Race Documentaries

A Brief Guide to Space Race Documentaries

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While I liked the space race movies I wrote about here recently, my preference is for documentaries. Fortunately, there are quite a few good examples of this breed. This isn’t a definitive listing, but rather a few of the better known space documentaries that are worth a look.

For All Mankind 1989-small

For All Mankind (1989)

It’s probably no accident that For All Mankind appeared in 1989, exactly two decades after humans first set foot on the moon. It focuses on the Apollo missions that culminated in several trips to the moon and features the usual array of archival footage, along with comments by Michael Collins (Apollo 11), Jim Lovell (Apollo 8/13), and 11 other Apollo astronauts. All of which is set to appropriately spacey music by ambient music pioneer, Brian Eno.

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New Treasures: Beyond Redemption by Michael R. Fletcher

New Treasures: Beyond Redemption by Michael R. Fletcher

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Beyond Redemption-smallWe all love to see new novels by our favorite writers. But this industry also warmly embraces new authors, especially when they bring something fresh and new. The latest hot buzz I’m hearing is for Canadian author Michael R. Fletcher, who’s just released his second novel, Beyond Redemption, the first in a gritty new series set in a world where delusion becomes reality… and the fulfillment of humanity’s desires may well prove to be its undoing.

When belief defines reality, those with the strongest convictions — the crazy, the obsessive, the delusional — have the power to shape the world. And someone is just mad enough to believe he can create a god . . .

Violent and dark, the world is filled with the Geistrekranken — men and women whose delusions manifest. Sustained by their own belief — and the beliefs of those around them — they can manipulate their surroundings. For the High Priest Konig, that means creating order out of the chaos in his city-state, leading his believers to focus on one thing: helping a young man, Morgen, ascend to become a god. A god they can control.

Trouble is, there are many who would see a god in their thrall, including the High Priest’s own doppelgangers, a Slaver no one can resist, and three slaves led by possibly the only sane man left. As these forces converge on the boy, there’s one more obstacle: time is running out. Because as the delusions become more powerful, the also become harder to control. The fate of the Geistrekranken is to inevitably find oneself in the Afterdeath. The question, then, is:

Who will rule there?

According to Fletcher’s bio, the next two novels in the Manifest Delusions series, The All Consuming and The Mirror’s Truth, are already complete, and are currently being edited for release.

Beyond Redemption was published by Harper Voyager on June 16, 2015. It is 512 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $10.99 for the digital version.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock Season 3 – What Happened?

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock Season 3 – What Happened?

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Sherlock Season 3Now, it’s certainly possible that I’m clueless (and I do LOVE Without a Clue), but I don’t think I’ve got the following all wrong regarding BBC’s Sherlock.

Except for the grumpy old man contingent (‘Get Sherlock out of modern day!’), fans of Holmes, including scholarly geeks like me who make their own newsletter, overwhelmingly liked this new show and the three episode season one.

I don’t know too many Holmes fans (other than GOM group: see above) who disliked this show. Even those who were moderately approving seemed pleased and intrigued with it and willing to tune in for another season.

So, season two came along, and more huzzahs and approval. I don’t remember Holmes friends of mine thinking it was going south. I certainly didn’t: I thought the first two seasons were brilliant and fun updatings of the great detective. I found cool references to Doyle’s tales all over the place.

Once again, no comments that it jumped the shark. Folks were absolutely looking forward to seeing how Holmes survived his Reichenbach Fall. It was one of my five all time favorite tv shows and probably battling Justified for number one.

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The Deep Structures of Dreams: Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84

The Deep Structures of Dreams: Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84

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1Q84The first two books of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 were published in Japan in 2009, with the third following in 2010. Plans for a one-volume English edition were soon underway, with the first two books translated by Jay Rubin and the third, due to time pressures, by J. Philip Gabriel. The complete English edition, running over 900 pages despite the editing-out of some extended recap passages in the third book, appeared in 2011.

And many American reviewers were disappointed, with some baffled by what they perceived as the book’s surrealism, and others complaining that not much seemed to happen in all those pages. Personally, I was engaged with the book’s dreamlike character. I find the sensibility not far from a lot of Japanese fantasy — consider the startling images produced by Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro) or even Osamu Tezuka (Metropolis, Astro Boy). That’s not to say that they’re of a piece with Murakami any more than Walt Disney and Jack Kirby are of a piece with, say, Jonathan Lethem; but if a culture has a hand in shaping the art produced by artists from that culture, then perhaps culture also shapes the way the fantastic is used within art, whether in the choice of images or in the way those images are interrogated. Which is to say that the use of fantasy is part of the tension between tradition and the individual talent.

Certainly 1Q84 is not a realist novel, and the characters don’t operate along realist lines. Throw away realist preconceptions, though, and there’s a consistency to their behaviour and to the strange worlds in which they find themselves. In fact, I find there’s a kind of familiarity at the core of the book, a concern with archetypal patterns enunciated by Joseph Campbell, by Jung, and especially by Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough. This only becomes clear about halfway through the whole work, which may explain the confusion of some readers. Much of the rest of the novel is dedicated to character analysis and flashbacks, which build an elliptical series of connections. In all it’s a kind of hero’s journey told in a restrained, neutral voice that delves deep into personal histories to uncover a Lynchian mix of strangeness and darkness. And the whole thing resolves with a rightness that suggests, to me, that Murakami’s found the psychologically correct way through his world of 1Q84.

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Is Berkeley Breathed Returning to Bloom County?

Is Berkeley Breathed Returning to Bloom County?

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Berkeley Breathed draws Bloom CountyBerkeley Breathed, creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip Bloom County, posted the enigmatic image at left on his Facebook page, showing him working on a new Bloom County strip, with the caption, “A return after 25 years. Feels like going home.”

Bloom County, one of the finest comic strips of the 20th Century, ran from December 8, 1980 to August 6, 1989. It featured a great deal of political satire and commentary on pop culture, and introduced the characters Bill the Cat, 10-year-old newspaper reporter Milo Bloom, the completely moral-free attorney Steve Dallas, and Opus the Penguin. Breathed ended the strip in 1989 to focus on a Sunday-only comic, Outland, and later a number of best-selling children’s books, including A Wish for Wings That Work: An Opus Christmas Story (1991), The Last Basselope (1992), Goodnight Opus (1993), and Mars Needs Moms! (2007), adapted into the Disney flop of the same name produced by Robert Zemeckis in 2011.

Breathed has not elaborated the exact meaning of his comment, but it seems pretty clear he’s returning to Bloom County in some fashion (and within hours of his post, speculation had already begun to spread that that’s exactly what he’s doing, in places like the A.V. Club and Comic Book Resources.)

However, there are some clues in the comments. Donald Trump, who was frequently the butt of Breathed’s jokes, and who played a role in the demise of the original strip (the final storyline featuring Trump buying out the strip and firing all the characters, forcing them to find jobs in other comic strips), is now running for President. Asked directly in the comments if Trump’s campaign had any influence on his decision to return, Breathed replied “This creator can’t precisely deny that the chap you mention had nothing do with it.” Stay tuned for additional details.