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Month: April 2018

New Treasures: The Hollow Tree by James Brogden

New Treasures: The Hollow Tree by James Brogden

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The Hollow Tree-smallJames Brogden’s Hekla’s Children was one of the breakout horror novels of 2017. Tim Lebbon called it “Brilliant… full of great twists, beautifully drawn characters, exceptional writing, and some really startling ideas,” and Steven Savile said “There’s some dark, sinister magic going on in these pages. Brogdan’s… one of the most compelling new voices out there.” Here’s Mark Morris:

Hekla’s Children marks the emergence on to a vibrant horror scene of an exciting new talent. James Brogden offers us a compulsive and unpredictable page-turner in which the ancient and modern world clash with devastating effect. Engaging characters, mind-bending concepts and enthralling set pieces propel the reader through a story in which the stakes are high and nothing can be taken for granted. Terrific stuff!

His new novel The Hollow Tree is something very different, the tale of a woman pulled into our world from…. somewhere else.

After her hand is amputated following a tragic accident, Rachel Cooper suffers vivid nightmares of a woman imprisoned in the trunk of a hollow tree, screaming for help. When she begins to experience phantom sensations of leaves and earth with her missing limb, Rachel is terrified she is going mad… but then another hand takes hers, and the trapped woman is pulled into our world.

This woman has no idea who she is, but Rachel can’t help but think of the mystery of Oak Mary, a female corpse found in a hollow tree, and who was never identified. Three urban legends have grown up around the case; was Mary a Nazi spy, a prostitute or a gypsy witch? Rachel is desperate to learn the truth, but darker forces are at work. For a rule has been broken, and Mary is in a world where she doesn’t belong…

The Hollow Tree was published by Titan Books on March 13, 2018. It is 483 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $8.99 for the digital edition. Read an excerpt at Dread Central.

Birthday Review: Sonya Dorman’s “When I Was Miss Dow”

Birthday Review: Sonya Dorman’s “When I Was Miss Dow”

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Cover by Gray Morrow
Cover by Gray Morrow

Sonya Dorman was born on April 6, 1924 and died on February 14, 2005. She occasionally published as Sonya Dorman Hess or Sonya Hess and had a career as a poet independent of her career in science fiction.

Dorman received a Rhysling Award in 1978 for her poem “Corruption of Metals.” Her story “When I Was Miss Dow” was nominated for a retrospective James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 1995.

“When I Was Miss Dow” was first published by Frederik Pohl in the June 1966 issue of Galaxy Magazine and it made the initial Nebula ballot the next year. Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison included the story in Nebula Award Stories 1967.  It was also reprinted in the British edition of Galaxy in January 1967. Judith Merril included it in SF 12 and Pamela Sargent reprinted it in Women of Wonder. The story appears in The Norton Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery. Ellen Datlow published it on-line in Sci Fiction on May 21, 2003. Many of the volumes that reprinted the story have gone by multiple titles.

Martha Dow is serving as a research assistant to Dr. Arnold Proctor on a colony planet. Although Martha looks and acts like a human woman, she is actually one of the indigenous species, a protean, who can change its shape at will. The proteans have adopted human form to better interact with the colonizers. While most of them take on the form for short periods of time, Martha has been forced to retain her human shape indefinitely, causing her to blur the distinctions between her natural self and the persona she has adopted.

As with many high concept stories, “When I Was Miss Dow” could benefit from being fleshed out more and giving an examination of the culture and world Dorman has created, but the focus of the piece, on how form impacts psychology and the male-female interaction, is strong. The humans have brought only men to the planet and the Proteans, who do not have gender the way humans think of it, fill the gap, although it would have been nice to see the humans have more curiosity about the situation.

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Dead and Looking Great: Night of the Living Dead Gets the Criterion Treatment

Dead and Looking Great: Night of the Living Dead Gets the Criterion Treatment

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Night of the Living Dead Karen Cooper-small

Kyra Schon as Karen Cooper in Night of the Living Dead

When George Romero, the Don Corleone of zombie movies, died last year, I did what I’m sure countless others did: I turned off the lights, boarded up the windows, laid in a supply of popcorn and Molotov cocktails, and settled down to watch Night of the Living Dead.

I first heard about the movie in the early seventies, when I came across an outraged condemnation of it in a Reader’s Digest I was flipping through while waiting to get my hair cut. When the flabbergasted critic said that the film’s monsters actually ate their victims — right there on the screen, I thought, “Oh, man — I have got to see this!” I caught it very soon thereafter on late night TV; it did not disappoint. It left an indelible mark on my psyche, and as a result I spent the next few years ignoring the teachers I was supposed to be listening to because I was too busy sketching out ways to defend my high school from a zombie attack. A typical American adolescence.

I have always considered Night of the Living Dead to be the most frightening of all horror films, and this most recent viewing revealed the movie to be as great as it ever was. In the years since 1968, other movies have certainly gone farther, but no movie has ever had as much impact; Romero’s nightmare vision can make your skin crawl in all the right places even now, and the hopeless, downbeat ending still packs quite a wallop. I watched with the same mounting dread and finished with the same feeling of lingering unease that I always experience after spending a claustrophobic evening with this soulless, hungry crew.

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Modular: Walk the Streets of Ancient Rome in Mythic Rome by Pete Nash

Modular: Walk the Streets of Ancient Rome in Mythic Rome by Pete Nash

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Mythic Rome-small Mythic Rome-back-small

Almost exactly a year ago Chaosium announced a brand new edition of RuneQuest, one of the oldest and most acclaimed RPGs on the planet. While that was great news for many gamers, it did leave the folks at The Design Mechanism in the lurch — their lovingly crafted RuneQuest sixth edition, written by Pete Nash and Lawrence Whitaker, was the best version of the game in decades, and now they’d lost the license.

The Design Mechanism folks had also supported their version with some of the most exciting releases we’d seen in years, including the Book of Quests, Shores of Korantia, and especially the brilliant Monster Island. While I was curious to see what Chaosium would do with the property, I was chiefly concerned with how the announcement would impact them.

Of course, I needn’t have worried. You can’t keep an outfit as creative as The Design Mechanism down for long. Without missing a beat they released their own full-fledged RPG system, Mythras, which picked up and elaborated on the work they’d done with sixth edition RuneQuest, while simultaneously expanding the rules to accommodate more diverse game settings, from Sword & Sorcery to Science Fiction and Urban Fantasy Horror. They also revamped all of their existing back catalog — including the irreplaceable Monster Island — to bring it up to date with the new system. And best of all, they’ve continued to release top notch new products, like Pete Nash’s fabulous Mythic Rome.

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Birthday Reviews: Robert Bloch’s “The Fane of the Black Pharoah”

Birthday Reviews: Robert Bloch’s “The Fane of the Black Pharoah”

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Weird Tales December 1937-small Weird Tales December 1937-back-small

Cover by Virgil Finlay

Robert Bloch was born on April 5, 1917 and died on September 23, 1994.

His short story “That Hell-Bound Train” won the Hugo Award in 1959, and he won the Bram Stoker Award for his non-fiction book Once Around the Bloch: An Unauthorized Autobiography, for his collection The Early Fears, and his novelette “The Scent of Vinegar.” His screenplay for the film Psycho, based on his novel, received the Edgar Allan Poe Award.

Bloch was the Guest of Honor for each of the three Toronto Worldcons, Torcon I in 1948, Torcon II in 1973, and posthumously for Torcon 3 in 2003. He also received a Special Worldcon Committee Award in 1984. Bloch was named a Grandmaster by the World Horror Con and received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Fantasy Convention. He has also received the Big Heart Award, the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award, and a Forry Award.

“The Fane of the Black Pharoah” was first published in Weird Tales in the December 1937 issue, edited by Farnsworth Wright. Donald Wollheim reprinted it a decade later in the Avon Fantasy Reader, No. 5, 1947 and Bloch included it in his Lovecraftian collection Mysteries of the Worm. Robert M. Price included it in two Lovecraft anthologies: Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos, from Fedogan & Bremer, and The Nyarlathotep Cycle: The God of a Thousand Forms, from Chaosium. In 1983 it was translated into French.

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Video Game Review: Tunnels & Trolls Adventures

Video Game Review: Tunnels & Trolls Adventures

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Iphone+6+plus

I’ve been hankering for some old school pen and paper adventuring lately, but not having a gaming group here in Madrid (or indeed any gaming group for a few decades now), I did what old school gamers always used to do when they found themselves all on their lonesome — I played some solo Tunnels & Trolls adventures.

But I did it with a modern twist. I played Tunnels & Trolls Adventures, a free app by MetaArcade. The app takes you through various classic adventures such as Sewers of Oblivion and Buffalo Castle and runs very smoothly. It’s been decades since I’ve played T&T, so I read all the intro material, which explained the game quickly and concisely and had me playing within minutes.

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Vintage Treasures: Study War No More, edited by Joe Haldeman

Vintage Treasures: Study War No More, edited by Joe Haldeman

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Study War No More-small Study War No More-back-small

By 1977 Joe Haldeman had already won three Hugo Awards, for his novella “Hero” (1972), his debut SF novel The Forever War, and his short story “Tricentennial” (1976), and one Nebula, also for The Forever War. He was a fast-rising star, and in November of that year he added the anthology Study War No More to his fast-growing SF catalog. It contained stories by some of the greatest SF writers of the time — including Poul Anderson, Harry Harrison, Isaac Asimov, George Alec Effinger, Damon Knight, and Mack Reynolds — that addressed the problem of war. Here a snippet from his introduction:

Fear of the atom was such an effective deterrent that it was over two weeks before war broke out again. A fellow with a wispy beard seized control of Hanoi. The editor of this anthology was in diapers when that happened; it lasted long enough to give him his first white hairs, and then five years more…

But why this anthology? The absurdity and outrage of war may be quite obvious, but trying to find a solution to it has occupied the energies of the race’s finest philosophers and poets for thousands of years, to no conspicious success.

Science fiction writers are generally renowned neither for the depth of their philosophy nor the fineness of their poetry, so isn’t it presumptuous of them to take on so formidable, yet subtle, an opponent? The answer is a duet: a soft “no,” and a loud “Hell, no!”

Haldeman was intimately familiar with war; he was a combat engineer in Vietnam who was wounded and received a Purple Heart. The inside cover of Study War No More addressed his experience, and how it had influenced his writing. Here it is.

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The Robots of Mahlon Blaine

The Robots of Mahlon Blaine

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Mahlon Blaine, Cowering Nude With Robot detail

Mahlon Blaine was born in 1894 and was blind in one eye. People have been writing his biography since the 1920s and that’s about all they can verify. He provided the cover art, a faceless figure carrying a sword and spear, for Sir Hugh Clifford’s The Further Side of Silence. When asked for a few words about his life, he provided these:

Mahlon Blaine has illustrated these Malayan dramas with the magic of his own experience. A New England Quaker descended from staunch old New Bedford Whalers, Mahlon Blaine went to sea at fifteen and sailed before the mast in one of the last of the old wind-jammers. Then under steam he commuted from the Pacific Coast to the Atlantic, to the Mediterranean, to the Arctic to all of Kipling’s Seven Seas where a merchantman seeks cargo. It is such eastern ports as Macao, Port Said, Hongkong, Pearl Harbor, that have given him his gallery of wicked, twisted Oriental faces and the museums of the world that have been his art schools. He has sailed up the Congo to make a collection of African masks, rescued fellow countrymen from jails in Indo-China, and nosed into many a Malay river for strange cargo and shipped many a Malay crew. He thinks that Sir Hugh Clifford has an uncanny knowledge of native psychology and can substantiate many of the stories by his own experiences.

Not one word is true, except possibly for the last sentence and “he.”

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Birthday Reviews: Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “The Worlds of If”

Birthday Reviews: Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “The Worlds of If”

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Wonder Stories August 1935-small Wonder Stories August 1935-back-small

Cover by Frank R. Paul

Stanley G. Weinbaum was born on April 4, 1902 and died of lung cancer on December 14, 1935, only 17 months after publishing his first story. During that time, he made an indelible mark on the field. Weinbaum Crater on Mars is named in his honor and in 2008, he received the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.

Weinbaum’s “The Worlds of If” was first published in the August 1935 issue of Wonder Stories, edited by Hugo Gernsback. Following Weinbaum’s death, it was included in Dawn of Flame: The Weinbaum Memorial Volume. Mort Weisinger reprinted the story in the March 1941 issue of Startling Stories and it was included in issue 1 of Fantasy, edited by Walter Gillings.

When Fantasy Press published A Martian Odyssey and Others, a collection of Weinbaum’s stories, “The Worlds of If” was included. Robert Silverberg selected it for Other Dimensions: Ten Stories of Science Fiction. Julie Davis included it in Science Fiction Monthly, in the July 1975 issue of the paperback series. When Ballantine published The Best of Stanley Weinbaum, the story was reprinted again.

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Beyond Fantasy Fiction, May and July, 1954: A Pair of Retro-Reviews

Beyond Fantasy Fiction, May and July, 1954: A Pair of Retro-Reviews

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Beyond Fantasy Fiction May 1954-small Beyond Fantasy Fiction July 1954-small

Most long-time SF fans are aware of the early ’40s fantasy magazine Unknown, edited by John Campbell as a companion to Astounding, and famous for encouraging a sort of “rational” fantasy. Much less well-known is the early 50s magazine Beyond, conceived by H. L. Gold as a fantasy companion to Galaxy. I recently read a couple of issues. I found interesting the degree to which they seem to be a sort of fantasy Galaxy-analogue in a way similar to the way Unknown was a fantasy Astounding-analogue. (That last pun definitely intended.)

Basically, I see the early 50s Galaxy as focusing on near-contemporary SFnal extrapolation, with typical “women’s magazine” characters (stereotypical housewives, stereotypical middle managers, etc.) dealing with mildly futuristic concepts. That’s an exaggeration, of course, and rather a caricature, but still I think it is true of at least a good portion of the early Galaxy. And in Beyond we see the same sort of characters, in almost exclusively contemporary situations, dealing with mildly fantastical concepts: genies, the devil, witches, wishes granted with undesirable side-effects, etc. I suppose another categorization might be “low-grade John Collier imitations.”

Each issue opens with a novella, and features a novelette or two and a few short stories. In longstanding Galaxy tradition, the dividing line between short story and novelette is pretty low — about 6000 words maybe, and one of the two novellas is about 16,000 words. Still, there was certainly no formal definition then, so who could complain? At least they didn’t label 10,000 word stories “Complete Novels.”

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