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Month: April 2018

Temporal Surges and Shapeshifting Invaders: Rich Horton on Threshold of Eternity by John Brunner and The War of Two Worlds by Poul Anderson

Temporal Surges and Shapeshifting Invaders: Rich Horton on Threshold of Eternity by John Brunner and The War of Two Worlds by Poul Anderson

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Threshold of Eternity John Brunner-small The War of Two Worlds Poul Anderson-small

One of the reasons I collect Ace Doubles — aside from the great cover art, and their historical significance — is that they frequently featured early work by some of my favorite authors. That’s definitely the case with Double D-335, which paired very early novels from two of the greatest SF writers of the late 20th Century, John Brunner’s Threshold of Eternity and Poul Anderson’s The War of Two Worlds.

Neither volume was reprinted in a standandalone edition after their original back-to-back appearance in 1959, so you can be forgiven if you’re unfamiliar with them. At his website Strange at Ecbatan, interplanetary paperback expert Rich Horton admits he was unaware of them until recently as well. Why review yet another obscure Ace Double?

I realized that it comprised two novels by writers I always enjoy that I was completely unaware of… I figured Anderson and Brunner are always worth a try, and anyway I have a certain quasi-completist attitude towards both of them.

Fair enough. Rich usually does his homework on the background for each book, often digging up some fascinating tidbits, and as usual he doesn’t disappoint.

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Birthday Reviews: Kingsley Amis’s “Mason’s Life”

Birthday Reviews: Kingsley Amis’s “Mason’s Life”

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The Young Oxford Book of Nightmares-small

Cover by George Smith

Kingsley Amis was born on April 16, 1922 and died on October 22, 1995.

Amis won the 1977 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his alternate history novel The Alteration. In 1990 he was knighted and made a Commander of the British Empire for his services to literature. Some of his major works included the novel Lucky Jim and the essay collection New Maps of Hell. He edited the five volume anthology series Spectrum with Robert Conquest. Amis’s son, Martin, also became a novelist and has written within the speculative fiction genre.

Amis originally published “Mason’s Life” in The Sunday Times in 1972. Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss included it in their Best SF: 1973. Helen Hoke included the story in Ghostly, Grim and Gruesome. The story reappeared in Amis’s collection Collected Short Stories. Peter Haining used it in Ghost Tour and Sebastian Wolfe included it in The Little Book of Horrors: Tiny Tales of Terror. When James E. Gunn expanded his The Road to Science Fiction, he included the story in volume 5, The British Way, and in 2000 it was included in The Young Oxford Book of Nightmares, edited by Dennis Pepper. “Mason’s Life” was translated into French in 1979 and 1984.

“Mason’s Life” is an existential piece of fiction that describes an encounter between Daniel Pettigrew and George Herbert Mason. In their encounter, Pettigrew seems exceedingly pushy, demanding personal information of Mason moments after the two meet. Although Mason balks, he does provide Pettigrew with the requested details. Pettigrew eventually explains that he needs them so he can discover if Mason is part of Pettigrew’s dream or one of the few real people in the world.

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Future Treasures: Dragon Road, Book II of Drifting Lands by Joseph Brassey

Future Treasures: Dragon Road, Book II of Drifting Lands by Joseph Brassey

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Skyfarer Joseph Brassey-small Dragon Road Joseph Brassey-small

Last August John DeNardo tipped me off to an exciting new series from Joseph Brassey. Editor Michael R. Underwood had this to say about Skyfarer, the first volume of The Drifting Lands and the first book he’d acquired & edited for Angry Robot Books.

I am of course very biased, but this book is *amazingly* fun, and fans of Star Wars, Firefly, and Final Fantasy will be very likely to have a great time with the book. It’s got heroic sorcerers, badass evil knights, skyships, A+ sword fights (the author is a HEMA instructor), a family-of-choice airship crew, and all the fantasy adventure you could want in a compact package.

Right on schedule comes the second book in the series, Dragon Road, arriving in paperback on May 1st.

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Birthday Reviews: Jim C. Hines’s “Spell of the Sparrow”

Birthday Reviews: Jim C. Hines’s “Spell of the Sparrow”

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Sword and Sorceress XXI-small Sword and Sorceress XXI-back-small

Cover by Arthur Rackham, 1910

Jim C. Hines was born on April 15, 1974.

Hines took first place in the Writers of the Future first quarter contest in 1999 for his story “Blade of the Bunny.” His novel Red Hood’s Revenge was nominated for the Gaylactic Spectrum Award. In 2012, he won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer.

“Spell of the Sparrow” first appeared in Sword and Sorceress XXI, edited by Diana L. Paxson. An audio version was included in PodCastle 13, edited by Rachel Swirsky. Hines included it in his e-book collection Kitemaster and Other Stories and it was also reprinted in his collection The Goblin Master’s Grimoire.

While there are many tales of changelings and children who are abducted by fairies, Hines goes for a different story in “Spell of the Sparrow.” Alycia and James are two happily married former thieves with a daughter who, against her mother’s wishes, sneaks off to practice magic. Their lives are thrown into turmoil when Basi, a Cloudling, turns up, having cast a love spell on James. Although Hines explains that Cloudlings use bird magic, and Basi has a sparrow as a familiar, he never fully explains what she is, nor why she chose to cast a spell on James.

“Spell of the Sparrow” is a puzzle story, with James in love with both Alycia and Basi, unable and unwilling to betray either one. Alycia and their daughter, Mel, must try to figure out a way to break the spell, although Basi, and Hines, set enough strictures on the way Cloudling magic works and Mel’s abilities that breaking the spell becomes nearly impossible.

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2000AD’s The Complete Futureshocks, Volume 1

2000AD’s The Complete Futureshocks, Volume 1

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the-complete-future-shocks-volume-1-small

In my ongoing study of comic history and the craft of comic storytelling, I’ve looked at the history of 2000AD, Alan Moore’s Halo Jones, and the density of comic layouts, in part because as a novelist and short story writer, I’m trying to learn things from other story forms. And comics have a lot to teach me about pacing, conciseness and story density.

And in no place are stories more dense than in 2000AD‘s Futureshocks. These are stories that range in length from 1.5 pages to 4 pages (basically 6-20 panels). Luckily for me, 2000AD is issuing a collection of their first 5 years of Futureshocks in The Complete Futureshocks Volume 1, and they sent me a review copy.

The Complete Futureshocks Volume 1 is over 300 pages of comics, which by my rough count is about 80 individual stories ranging in length from 1.5 – 4 pages, with a few rare ones that stretched across two issues and totalled 6-8 pages.

What did I learn from all these very brief science fiction stories? A few things.

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A Brief History of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine

A Brief History of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine

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Pulphouse the Hardcover Magazine-small

In 1988 I had just started grad school at the University of Illinois, and finally moved out of my parent’s basement. I’d also left my book collection behind and settled into a small dorm room. I continued collecting, albeit in a much more cramped space, and as the years went by the book piles on the floor gradually grew into towering stacks that made moving around tough. I graduated just in time in 1991, before I completely ran out of floor space, and moved into my first apartment (with real bookcases!) in Wheaton, Illinois.

While in grad school I missed my regular runs to the shops to buy magazines, and during my periodic trips back to Ottawa I was hungry for any fiction mags I could find. My friends were talking about a strange book/magazine crossbreed titled Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine and, curious, I picked up a few issues at the House of Speculative Fiction on my next visit. It turned out to be very impressive indeed, and over the next few years I bought copies whenever I found them.

Pulphouse was closer to a regular anthology series than a magazine; its quarterly issues varied between 243 and 311 pages, and featured a compelling mix of new and established authors. It was the brainchild of Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch; the first issue appeared in 1988, and it stuck to a quarterly schedule for three years, before wrapping up with issue #12 in Fall of 1993.

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Peplum Populist: The Maciste Films of Italian Silent Cinema (2015)

Peplum Populist: The Maciste Films of Italian Silent Cinema (2015)

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The mighty muscleman Maciste has battled his way across millions of cinema screens around the globe, toppling tyrants, aiding the oppressed, vanquishing monsters, and taking on evil armies. Yet most of the world doesn’t even know his name. Instead, Maciste has gone undercover with pseudonyms such as Colossus, Atlas, Goliath, and most often, Hercules.

Maciste first appeared in the Italian sword-and-sandal (peplum) boom of 1957–1965 in Maciste in the Valley of the Kings (1960), which became Son of Samson in English-speaking territories and started the tradition of erasing the character’s name outside his home country. Maciste featured in twenty-four more pepla over the next five years, placing him second only to Hercules in the pantheon of sword-and-sandal strongmen. Since I started these “Peplum Populist” articles a year and a half ago, I’ve examined four Maciste films — and just one has “Maciste” in its English title, Maciste in Hell (1962), and that was only in the U.K. It became The Witch’s Curse in the U.S. I’ve come across only two Maciste film that use his name in the English dubbing, and in Colossus and the Headhunters he still lost his name in the title. 

So who is this brawny Italian superman? Why did everyone in Italy seem to know who he was and hold him almost equal to Hercules at the movie palaces?

The short answer: Maciste is a hero created not from myth, folklore, or poetry, but from movies. The long answer: well, it’s a long answer, hence why this article exists. I’ve wanted to explore the whole “Maciste issue” at length, and discovered the best approach was to go right to the source — Maciste’s roots in the silent films of Italy. The most extensive English study on the topic is The Maciste Films of Italian Silent Cinema by Jacqueline Reich (Indiana University Press, 2015). Consider this your history of the origin of Maciste by way of a book overview.

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Birthday Reviews: Rachel Swirsky’s “The Monster’s Million Faces”

Birthday Reviews: Rachel Swirsky’s “The Monster’s Million Faces”

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Cover by Shaun Tan
Cover by Shaun Tan

Rachel Swirsky was born on April 14, 1982. To this point, her writing career has been focused on short stories, although in 2010 she co-edited the anthology People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy with Sean Wallace. Her stories have been collected in two volumes, Through the Drowsy Dark and How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future.

Swirsky won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 2010 for her story “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” and the Nebula for Best Short Story in 2014 for “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.” She has been nominated for four additional Nebulas as well as four Hugos and four World Fantasy Awards, including nominations for both of her Nebula winning stories for all of those Awards. Swirsky was a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist for “Eros, Philia, Agape” and also has a Rhysling Award nomination for her poem “The Oracle on River Street.”

“The Monster’s Million Faces” was first published at Tor.com on September 8, 2010, acquired by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. In February of the following year, Tor issued the story as an electronic chapbook and they included it in their massive e-book The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com in 2013. That same year, the story saw its first print publication when Swirsky included it in her collection How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future.

Monsters come in all forms and Swirsky examines them in “The Monster’s Million Faces,” a story about Aaron, who was kidnapped and abused for five days when he was eight years old. As an adult he is trying to deal with the trauma, especially after he attacked his boss in a blind rage brought on by her sexual advances.

Aaron is working with a psychiatrist, Dana, who puts him into a series of trances, not just to have him confront his abuser, but to try to figure out what sort of false memory they can graft onto him to help him move past what happened to him. Never entirely explicit, the false memories he undergoes are each horrifying in their own way as he confronts different versions of his attacker, each with their own motive, many of which remain hidden to Aaron. At the same time, he tries to work through his own fear, anger, and rage to understand why a stranger, who has never been caught, would do what he did to an innocent eight year old.

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Vintage Treasures: Witch Blood by Will Shetterly

Vintage Treasures: Witch Blood by Will Shetterly

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Witch Blood Will Shetterly-small Witch Blood Will Shetterly-back-small

Will Shetterly’s first novel Cats Have No Lord was published in 1985, the same year he launched his groundbreaking Liavek shared world anthology series, which he co-edited with his wife Emma Bull. Cats Have No Lord placed sixth in the annual Locus Poll for Best First Novel (losing to Tad Williams, Guy Gavriel Kay, Michael Swanwick, and Carl Sagan, but placing ahead of Geoff Ryman, Judith Tarr, Sheila Finch, and Dan Simmons — man, 1985 was a competitive year!)

Over the next few years Shetterly quickly established a solid reputation, with novels like The Tangled Lands (1989), Nevernever (1993), and especially Dogland (1997), the tale a of child growing up in a dog-themed amusement park. It was inspired by his early years at the Dog Land tourist attraction, which was owned by his parents. His novel Elsewhere (1991), part of Terri Windling’s shared universe The Borderland, won the Minnesota Book Award. He has largely given up writing since producing his last book, Midnight Girl, a self-published online novel, in 2009.

Witch Blood was his second novel; it was released as a paperback original by Ace in April 1986. It has never been reprinted, although Shetterly released a digital edition in 2012. When it was released Orson Scott Card called it “”A funny, exciting adventure story that delighted me from beginning to end.” Modern readers draw strong parallels to Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos novels, which seems like a fair comparison. It’s not hard to find; I bought a copy last weekend at Half Price Books for $1.49. It is 197 pages, with a cover price of $2.95. The cover is by Penalva.

Birthday Reviews: Bill Pronzini’s “Cat”

Birthday Reviews: Bill Pronzini’s “Cat”

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Cover by David Palladini
Cover by David Palladini

Bill Pronzini was born on April 13, 1943.

Although he has written significant science fiction, Pronzini is better known as a mystery author, specifically of the Nameless Detective series. He has also served as an editor on nearly 100 books, including some science fiction and fantasy anthologies, and occasionally with co-editors such as Martin H. Greenberg, Marcia Muller, to whom he is married, Ed Gorman, and others.

In 1981 Pronzini was nominated for the British Science Fiction Association Award for his story “Prose Bowl,” co-written with Barry N. Malzberg. He received a World Fantasy Award nomination the following year for his anthology Mummy! A Chrestomathy of Crypt-ology.

“Cat” was originally published by Edward L. Ferman in the November 1978 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was reprinted in a Portuguese edition of the magazine within a few years and was also translated into Italian for publication in Urania.

Cat stories are ubiquitous in science fiction, enough so that Andre Norton was able to publish five volumes in her Catfantastic anthology series, and other authors have also published anthologies of feline science fiction and fantasy. Pronzini’s “Cat,” surprisingly, hasn’t been reprinted in any of these anthologies. It is a sort of recursive science fiction, not in the usual sense, but because Benson, Pronzini’s main character, not only reads science fiction, but refers to the stories, by author and title, giving shout-outs to multiple Fredric Brown stories, as well as works by E. Hoffman Price, Jerome Bixby, George Langelaan, James Thurber, and others.

The basic premise is that a cat has wandered into Bronson’s house and he doesn’t know how it got there. Allowing his imagination to run wild, Bronson begins to feel uneasy about the cat’s presence, eventually turning to fear. Bronson’s emotion and response to the cat builds quite rapidly, until he decides to shoot the animal.

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