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Month: December 2018

New Treasures: Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

New Treasures: Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

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Creatures of Will and Temper-small Creatures of Want and Ruin-small

When Molly Tanzer’s novel Creatures of Will and Temper was published last year, I confidently predicted that it would be huge.

Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Will and Temper looks like a breakout book. It’s got all the classic elements — fabulous setting, swordplay, and the supernatural — while also being totally original. And there’s no doubt in my mind that Molly is poised for a break-out. Her first novel Vermilion received rave reviews (“A splendid page-turner of a Weird West adventure… hugely entertaining” — Publishers Weekly), and her most recent book was the anthology Swords vs Cthulhu, co-edited with Jesse Bullington. How cool is that?

I’m pleased to see that the book was very warmly received — it was nominated for the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and critics praised it widely. Jeff VanderMeer said it was “A delightful, dark, and entertaining romp,” and Outlander author Diana Gabaldon called it “An artful, witty, Oscar Wilde pastiche with the heart of a paranormal thriller.”

Molly’s follow up, Creatures of Want & Ruin, arrived from John Joseph Adams Books last month, and was selected as a Barnes & Noble Best Science Fiction Fantasy Book of November 2018. Tor.com‘s Liz Bourke calls it “A measured, atmospheric novel, with compelling characters and a deeply disturbing undercurrent of horror,” and the B&N Sci-Fi Blog says “Molly Tanzer does it all; from her debut novel, named best book of 2015 by i09, to the “thoughtful erotica” she edits at her magazine, Congress, she’s proven to be one of the most distinct voices in contemporary SFF.”

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Birthday Reviews: Michael Moorcock’s “The Frozen Cardinal”

Birthday Reviews: Michael Moorcock’s “The Frozen Cardinal”

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Cover by Jim Burns
Cover by Jim Burns

Michael Moorcock was born on December 18, 1939.

Moorcock’s novella “Behold the Man” won the Nebula Award in 1968. He has won the British Fantasy Award six times, for the novels The Knight of the Swords, The King of the Swords, The Sword and the Stallion, and The Hollow Lands, as well as for the short story “The Jade Man’s Eyes.” He won a special committee award from them in 1993. In 1979 he won the World Fantasy Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Gloriana. His Elric saga won the Seiun Award in 1986. Moorcock received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the World Fantasy Con in 2000, the Prix Utopia in 2004, and the Bram Stoker Awards in 2005. In 2002 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and was named a Grand Master by SFWA in 2008. Moorcock was guest of honor at the 2nd World Fantasy Con, held in New York in 1976 and at LoneStarCon 2, the 55th Worldcon, held in San Antonio, Texas in 1997.

“The Frozen Cardinal” originally appeared in the anthology Other Edens, edited by Robert Holdstock and Christopher Evans, in 1987.  Moorcock included it in his collection Casablanca in 1989 and in 1993, it was included in the Moorcock collection Earl Aubec and Other Stories. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer selected the story for The Big Book of Science Fiction: The Ultimate Collection in 2016. In 1990 the story was translated into French to appear in the anthology Universe 1990, edited by Pierre K. Rey.

While Moorcock may be best known for his epic fantasy about the Eternal Champion or his Jerry Cornelius novels, he has also written a significant amount of straight science fiction. “The Frozen Cardinal” is set in the polar regions of the distant planet Moldavia and takes the form of several private communiques sent back to Earth by a member of the first exploration team to the area of the planet, which is just beginning to come out of an ice age.

Moorcock manages to present his trip to a distant world as a tedious expedition. His narrator, as well as the entire crew, is just focused on the next tasks they must accomplish, most of which are the repetitive crossing of vast chasms, a dangerous activity, but one that has become routine as they use the same process at each crevice. Their monotony is broken when they discover a figure embedded in the ice on the side of one of the crevices and determine that it is a Roman Catholic Cardinal.

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A Year of Weirdbook

A Year of Weirdbook

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Not all that long ago, Douglass Draa was the Online Editor for Weird Tales, maintaining a lively Facebook presence and posting numerous highly readable articles on the website (which, sadly, have now been removed.) Although the magazine has essentially been dead since 2014, Doug kept the Weird Tales name alive as best he could, and I frequently found myself wondering what someone with that much energy could do with more editorial control.

We found out in 2015 when the much-loved magazine Weirdbook returned to print with Doug at the helm. The first issue, #31, was a generous 160 pages of brand new weird fiction and sword & sorcery from many familiar names, packaged between gorgeous covers by Dusan Kostic and Stephen E. Fabian. Over the next three years Doug has produced no less than 10 issues — a staggering 2,000+ pages of new content — plus the very first Weirdbook Annual in 2017. Issues arrive like clockwork, and the magazine only seems to get better and better.

2018 was a great year for Weirdbook, with three huge issues. It seems to have settled into a comfortable 256-pages, and readers of this blog will be pleased, as I was, to see several Black Gate writers among the contributors — including John C. Hocking, John R. Fultz, and the prolific Darrell Schweitzer, with no less than three stories. I was especially pleased to see Doug’s use of quality interior art, which I think greatly enhances the look of the magazine. The latest issue, which just arrived last week, includes moody and effective spot art by the great Allen Koszowski, who also graced the pages of Black Gate back in the day.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Black Mask‘s Cap Shaw on Writing

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Black Mask‘s Cap Shaw on Writing

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BlackMask_May1934EDITED“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

The hardboiled school was born in the page of Black Mask Magazine under the editorship of George W. Sutton, with Carroll John Daly’s “Three Gun Terry” (which I wrote about here…) and “Kings of the Open Palm,” and Dashiell Hammett’s “Arson Plus,” appearing in 1923. In 1924, Sutton resigned and circulation editor Phil Cody replaced him.

Cody pushed for more stories featuring Race Williams and the Continental Op, encouraged Erle Stanley Gardner to develop Ed Jenkins (‘The Phantom Crook’), and added Frederick Nebel and Raoul Whitfield to the magazine. Cody was pushed out by publisher Eltinge Warner in 1926, with Cody’s approval (he later became President of the company). Joseph Shaw, a former bayonet instructor in the army and an unsuccessful writer with zero editorial experience, took the reins (I mean, sure, why not?).

But it is Shaw who is revered as the editor who shaped and was largely responsible for the success of the hardboiled school. While he did not start the movement, it’s still a reasonable assertion. Shaw honed Black Mask into a razor sharp hardboiled pulp that dominated the field.

In May of 1934, Writer’s Digest featured a cover story titled, Do You Want to Become a Writer or Do You Want to Make Money? by Shaw. I’ve included that essay below, with a few comments of my own included in italics.

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Birthday Reviews: Jack L. Chalker’s “Now Falls the Cold, Cold Night”

Birthday Reviews: Jack L. Chalker’s “Now Falls the Cold, Cold Night”

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Cover by Barclay Shaw
Cover by Barclay Shaw

Jack L. Chalker was born on December 17, 1944 and died on February 11, 2005.

Although Chalker may be best known for his Well of Souls series of novels, his only Hugo Award nominations were for his amateur magazine, Mirage, in 1963 and his non-fiction book The Science Fantasy Publishers: A Critical and Bibliographic History: Third Edition, co-written with Mark Owings. The book also won the Readercon Award in 1992. Chalker was a two-time nominee for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. In 1980 he received the Skylark Award from NESFA, and in 2005 he posthumously received the Phoenix Award from DeepSouthCon.

Chalker wrote “Now Falls the Cold, Cold Night” for Mike Resnick’s 1992 anthology Alternate Presidents. The story has never been reprinted. It was his last published piece of short fiction, although Chalker continued to publish novels and non-fiction.

Set in a rooming house in Albany, New York, “Now Falls the Cold, Cold Night” takes place in a world in which following James Buchanan’s death during the election of 1856, Millard Fillmore is able to capture a second term on the Know-Nothing ticket. Fully embracing his anti-immigration stance, Fillmore is in thrall to the Southerners who helped elect him and promotes pro-slavery policies, including the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act passed during his first term in 1850. His policies have caused unrest in New England, resulting in a second Boston Massacre when troops opened fire on citizens trying to stop a runaway slave from being taken back to the South.

The rooming house is a collection of men who have business with the New York state legislature, although one of them, Mr. Green, keeps to himself, leading another, Mr. Morgan, to question his purpose. The two play a cat and mouse game revealing that they actually have been aware of each other for quite some time. While both claim, like all the men in the rooming house, to oppose Fillmore’s agenda, they have very different methods of fighting for what they believe is right.

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Steve Carper on the Solo SF Art of Leo Dillon

Steve Carper on the Solo SF Art of Leo Dillon

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Leo Dillon Galaxy art 2-small Leo Dillon Galaxy art-small

Art for Stephen Barr’s “The Back of Our Heads” by Leo Dillon (Galaxy, July 1958)

Leo Dillon, who passed away in 2012, was one half of the famous husband-and-wife art team of Leo and Diane Dillon, who won back-to-back Caldecott Awards in 1976 and 1977, and the 1971 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist for their work on Terry Carr’s Ace Special covers. They created some of the most iconic SF and Fantasy cover art of the 20th Century, including Harlan Ellison’s Deathbird Stories and Strange Wine, John Brunner’s The Traveller in Black, and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. But before he began to work with Diane, Leo had a career doing interior art for Galaxy magazine from 1957-60. BG blogger Steve Carper unravels some of their fascination history at his blog Flying Cars and Food Pills.

Even though they had been working full-time as illustrators in the publishing industry, they were neither wealthy nor famous nor much recognized in the science fiction community in 1968… They knew Harlan Ellison, though, having done covers for his books as early as 1961, and he naturally recruited them for the cover of his monumental 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions. There weren’t supposed to be any interior illustrations but Harlan, being Harlan, suddenly decided he wanted them. On the Friday before the book was to go to press on Monday. He hied over to the Dillon’s brownstone in Brooklyn and they stayed up the entire weekend taking inspiration from Harlan’s synopses of all 33 stories. For some reason Harlan brought Terry Carr with him…. Diane [recalled]: “After that, Terry began giving us assignments for book jackets, the Ace Specials.”

Read the article here, complete with generous samples of Leo Dillon’s interior art, and a lengthy listing of his art for stories by Poul Anderson, Theodore Sturgeon, Clifford D. Simak, Fritz Leiber, H. Beam Piper, Frederik Pohl, Zenna Henderson, William Tenn, Robert Sheckley, and many others.

Only Disconnect: Ray Bradbury’s “The Murderer”

Only Disconnect: Ray Bradbury’s “The Murderer”

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(1) Amazing Stories-small

High on the list of unwritten books that I’d like to read is An Encyclopedia of Misconceptions. I am unswervingly committed to traditional paper books, but this is one that I would have to read electronically; a physical book would just be too damn big. Everyone would have a chapter — men, women, LBGTQ folks, atheists, evangelicals, millennials, seniors, Democrats, Republicans, police officers, bus drivers, food service workers, Fortune 500 CEO’s, any racial or sexual or religious or social or political or generational or economic group that you can name, in fact — everyone feels misunderstood. Everyone knows themselves to be quite different from what other people assume them to be.

Such wrong ideas can attach themselves to almost everything in our lives, even including the books that we read. For example, one widespread misconception holds that the main purpose of science fiction is to predict the future! This notion is most rigidly held by those who have almost no familiarity with any actual science fiction. Such people gleefully point out SF’s failure to predict the internet (even though… well, we’ll get to that), or they “prove” the shallowness or silliness of the entire genre with the help of tales from the yellowing pages of Amazing Stories, yarns that depict a 21st century where everyone enjoys lives of anti-gravity-belt enhanced leisure with every want met by humanoid robot laborers (which hasn’t quite happened, in case you haven’t noticed).

But of course H.G. Wells didn’t really think that we were going to be invaded by Martians or believe that it was possible to concoct a formula that would make us invisible, nor was he convinced that vivisection could make the family dog into something that was virtually human. His books were really comments on the present in the form of visions of the future, and the technologies he invented were tools that enabled him to bring his own society and its potentialities into sharper focus.

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Birthday Reviews: Arthur C. Clarke’s “Let There Be Light”

Birthday Reviews: Arthur C. Clarke’s “Let There Be Light”

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Playboy, February 1958
Playboy, February 1958

Arthur C. Clarke was born on December 16, 1917 in Minehead, England and died on March 19, 2008 in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Clarke won the Hugo and Nebula Awards three times each. Rendezvous with Rama and The Fountains of Paradise both won for best novel (and also both won the British SF Association Award). His novella “A Meeting with Medusa” won the Nebula in 1973 and the short story “The Star” won the Hugo in 1956. He also won the Retro Hugo for his short stories “The Nine Billion Names of God” and “How We Went to Mars.” Both “A Meeting with Medusa” and Rendezvous with Rama won the Seiun Award and Rama also won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and Jupiter Award. Clarke won the Geffen Award for Childhood’s End. His novel Imperial Earth was inducted into the Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame in 2001. He received the International Fantasy Award for his non-fiction book The Exploration of Space.

Clarke was the guest of honor at NYCon II, the 14th Worldcon, held in New York in 1956. He received a Forry Award from LASFS in 1982 and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1986. In 1997 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. He won a Gallun Award in 2001, was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 2002 and in 2004 received the Robert A. Heinlein Award. The Arthur C. Clarke Award, sponsored by the BSFA, the Science Fiction Foundation, and the SCI-FI LONDON Film Festival, was established in 1987 to honor science fiction published in the UK.

Clarke collaborated on fiction with Gregory Benford, Gentry Lee, Stephen Baxter, Mike McQuay, Michael P. Kube-McDowell, and Frederik Pohl. His story “The Sentinel” formed the basis for his novel and the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the sequel of which, 2010, was also turned into a film. His novel Childhood’s End was adapted into a television mini-series.

“Let There Be Light” was initially published on September 5, 1957 in the Dundee Sunday Telegraph. It was first reprinted in February 1958 in Playboy magazine. It would eventually be reprinted in the Playboy Press science fiction anthology Transit of Earth in 1971. Clarke included it in his collection Tales of Ten Worlds in 1962 and it also appeared in The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke in 2000. The story appeared in German in the 1963 collection Unter den Wolken der Venus. In 1980 it was translated into Croatian for the March issue of Sirius #45. A French translation of the story appeared in the Arthur C. Clarke collection Le Livre d’or de la science-fiction: Arthur C. Clarke (a.k.a. Et la lumière), in 1981. Guido Zurlino and Beata Della Frattina translated the story into Italian for inclusion in the January 1987 issue of Urania #1039. It appeared in French again in 2013 as part of the collection Odyssées: l’integrale des nouvelles. Although the story fits into Clarke’s Tales from the White Hart series, it was not included in that collection, which was first published eight months before the story first appeared.

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Goth Chick News: Carrie White Joins Twitter and It’s Awesome

Goth Chick News: Carrie White Joins Twitter and It’s Awesome

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Carrie at the Prom

Let’s be honest, social media can be a serious bummer sometimes. If you’re active on all the various platforms then you know that for every adorable puppy video there’s at least one or more trolls who can’t help but spread negativity. Between mean-spirited memes and the general lack of empathy for fellow human beings it’s enough to make you pack it in and decide it just isn’t worth being that ‘connected’.

But then something like this happens.

Someone in the Twitterverse decided to create an account and assume the persona of Stephen King’s telekinetic, introverted teenager Carrie, made famous in his very first novel and played by Sissy Spacek in Brian De Palma’s 1976 film adaptation.

The account has only been up since December 4, but it went from having 8 followers a few days ago, to 86 as of this morning, and the goal seems to be to give voice to some of Carrie’s inner musings while reminding us all there are still fun people out there.

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Rodan, The 1956 Flying Monster Who Colorized the Godzilla-verse

Rodan, The 1956 Flying Monster Who Colorized the Godzilla-verse

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rodan-2019-poster

The trailer for Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the direct sequel to the 2014 US Godzilla and the third installment in the Warner Bros. “Monsterverse” series after Kong: Skull Island, arrived earlier this week. It’s beautiful kaiju madness, even without Debussy’s dulcet tones rolling beneath it. King Ghidorah appears in all its auriferous splendor, charging into Godzilla in a jaw-dropping final shot meant to bring tears to my eyes. It succeeded. Our own Nick Ozment has some thoughts about it he put up yesterday which you should check out.

I’m tempted to proclaim the wonders of King Ghidorah, but I’ve already given the three-headed space dragon plenty of attention in a post about Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster, the 1964 film that’s essentially the template for the upcoming Godzilla movie. So as an alternate, I’m going to talk about the other monster who has money shots in the trailer: Rodan, one of the oldest of Toho Studio’s monsters. Specifically, I’m going to look at Rodan’s debut, a self-titled showstopper from 1956 and the first Toho kaiju film in color.

Sora no Daikaiju Radon (“The Giant Monster of the Sky, Rodan”), which Toho titled Rodan for US foreign sales to avoid confusion with the chemical element radon,* was released the year after the first Godzilla sequel, Godzilla Raids Again. The second go-around for Godzilla was financially successful, but not the earth-shaker of the original. Toho didn’t think there was more to mine from Godzilla and wouldn’t return to the Big G until King Kong vs. Godzilla eight years later. But Toho executives were willing to bet theatergoers would show up to see a destruction spectacle with an new type of monster … especially if was IN TECHNICOLOR! Or Eastmancolor.

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