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Month: July 2019

Hither Came Conan: Gabe Dybing on “The People of the Black Circle”

Hither Came Conan: Gabe Dybing on “The People of the Black Circle”

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Black_Circle

Fellow Black Gater Gabe Dybing loaded his entry directly into the website and it fell off my radar. My fault. HERE is the final entry in our Hither Came Conan series, as he tackles “The People of the Black Circle,” which I’ve always felt, story-wise, was one of REH’s more unique Conan tales. Read on! 

Robert E. Howard’s novella “The People of the Black Circle,” first published in the September, October and November 1934 issues of Weird Tales, contains all of the elements that, in retrospect, entail an ultimate Conan tale. As an exemplar of what was to become known as the Sword & Sorcery subgenre of fantasy literature, “Black Circle” exhibits Conan as a swordsmen at the height of his career in brigandry: the tale commences with Conan negotiating for the release of seven of his hillmen chieftains who are being held by the Devi of Vendhya for ransom or execution.

But Conan has not lost any of his more youthful thiefly abilities; his introduction in this story has him climbing through a window after sneaking over a barbican and single-handedly dispatching of the guards there. The “sorcery” portion of the Sword & Sorcery subgenre is supplied here by not just one but by an entire Circle of magic-users. Most notable of these are Khemsa (who even is a perspective character!) and the Master of Yimsha, who ultimately is the chief adversary of the novella. To further exemplify the Sword & Sorcery genre, the narrative contains ample doses of the weird—monstrous antagonists, an adventure locale worthy of a Dungeons & Dragons module, and even one secret passage! But that’s not all!

Other Conan stories contain these things, too, but this story is the very best Conan story because it has what no other does — the Devi of Vendhya. “Black Circle” exhibits all the things that we love about Conan, but, unlike any other, it also details the making of a lover and a heroine to complement Conan in every way.

What? Isn’t that heroine supposed to be Red Sonja (to confuse the Conan “canon”) or one of Conan’s two great “loves” (Belit or Zenobia)? Perhaps, perhaps not. Conan had many women throughout his varied careers, and if he never came to actually “love” Yasmina, the Devi of Vendhya, then he at least recognized in her, at the end of this tale, all of the qualities that he most valued in a woman. A major aspect of “Black Circle” is just who Conan is at this time of his life and what characteristics could counterbalance this hero as a satisfying lover, if not a full mate. Through her experiences in this tale, Yasmina transforms — at least in Conan’s eyes — from an artificial and unattainable Devi into a true “elemental” woman of passion and desire.

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John DeNardo’s Adventures in Short Fiction

John DeNardo’s Adventures in Short Fiction

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The Dark Issue 49-small Lightspeed June 2019-small Wastelands The New Apocalypse John Joseph Adams-small

Last month I checked in with John DeNardo, the most well-informed man in science fiction, to get his take on the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy in June. I posted a brief summary on June 26, and John dropped by to leave the following in the Comments:

Oh, and speaking of short fiction, my article on cool, recent short fiction reads is now up, too.

Adventures in Short Fiction: Supernatural Detectives, Civil War Airships, Harvesting the Dead, and Reality Shows with Guns.

It’s tough to resist a resist an article with a title like that. (Go ahead and try.) When you’re too busy to keep up with the flood of new novels (and virtually all of us are, unless your name is John DeNardo), but you want keep tabs on what’s going on, short fiction will keep you up-to-date on who’s doing really innovate and exciting work.

Where can you find the best genre short fiction these days? John recommends several online publications, including Sean Wallace’s magazine of horror and dark fantasy, The Dark, John Joseph Adams’ SF and fantasy magazine Lightspeed, and Mike Resnick’s Galaxy’s Edge, plus recent anthologies such as Ken Liu’s Broken Stars, Paula Guran’s Mythic Journeys: Retold Myths and Legends, and Wastelands: The New Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams. Here’s some excerpts from John’s comments.

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The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Fantasia

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Fantasia

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Fantasia Poster
Fantasia Poster

Fantasia Poster
Fantasia Poster

The Balrog Award, often referred to as the coveted Balrog Award, was created by Jonathan Bacon and first conceived in issue 10/11 of his Fantasy Crossroads fanzine in 1977 and actually announced in the final issue, where he also proposed the Smitty Awards for fantasy poetry. The awards were presented for the first time at Fool-Con II at the Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas on April 1, 1979. The awards were never taken particularly seriously, even by those who won the award. The final awards were presented in 1985. The Film Hall of Fame Awards were not presented the first year the Balrogs were given out, being created in 1980.

Released on November 13, 1940, Fantasia was the third feature length animated film made by Walt Disney, following on the heels of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio.  The film built on the Silly Symphonies series of shorts Disney released between 1929 and 1939.  While the Silly Symphonies married images to original music, Fantasia would take eight pieces of known classical music and use them to tell stories.

While Snow White and Pinocchio were aimed at a juvenile audience, Fantasia is very much a film for adults. The lack of dialogue, and what dialogue there is being expository, mean that, although certain sections of the film will appeal to children, most kids will be bored through much of the movie.

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Carol Emshwiller wins the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award

Carol Emshwiller wins the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award

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Report to the Men's Club-small The Secret City Emshwiller-small The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller Volume 1-small

Author Carol Emshwiller, who died in February of this year at the age of 97, has won the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, which honors overlooked and neglected science fiction and fantasy writers who deserve to be discovered by modern readers.

I met Carol only a couple of times, always at the World Fantasy Convention. I’m pretty sure she was in her 90s both times we met. She was friendly, approachable, and absolutely charming. Many writers have a late flowering in their career; Carol, who was the wife of Ed Emshwiller, one of the most popular and prolific SF cover artists of the 50s and 60s, and who famously was the model for most of the beautiful women in his paintings, published her first stories in 1955, but wrote the majority of her substantial body of short fiction from 1985 – 2011, after she turned 60. She published the first of her four SF novels, Carmen Dog, in 1988, when she was 67.

It took far too long for Carol to be acknowledged as a serious writer, but it eventually happened. Her short story “Creature” won a Nebula Award in 2002; she won again for “I Live With You” in 2005. Her 2002 novel The Mount was nominated for a Nebula and won the Philip K. Dick Award. Her 1990 collection The Start of the End of It All won the World Fantasy Award, and she received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2005.

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Vintage Treasures: Science Fiction of the 40’s, edited by Martin Harry Greenberg, Joseph Olander, and Frederik Pohl

Vintage Treasures: Science Fiction of the 40’s, edited by Martin Harry Greenberg, Joseph Olander, and Frederik Pohl

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Science Fiction of the 40s-small Science Fiction of the 40s-back-small

Cover by Earle Bergey

In 1972, Knight famously wrote a cranky essay for Robin Scott Wilson’s Clarion II about the disappearance of SF’s old guard, focusing on the long-forgotten pulp writer Henry J. Kostkos, who published a dozen stories in Amazing and Astounding from 1933-1940. Knight complained that it was impossible to sell pulp reprints to a modern audience, mostly because the stories were crap.

In 1974 Isaac Asimov published Before the Golden Age, a massive 928-page retrospective of the early science fiction pulps, wth stories by Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, Murray Leinster, P. Schuyler Miller, Clifford D. Simak, Stanley G. Weinbaum, John W. Campbell, Jr., Charles R. Tanner, and many others. It was picked up by the Science Fiction Book Club and became a huge hit, remaining in print for nearly 15 years.

Two years after Asimov proved just how wrong he was, Knight published his own pulp anthology, Science Fiction of the 30’s. He opened with this mea culpa in his introduction.

In compiling this volume I have partially fulfilled an old ambition, one which I thought I had give up years ago — to reread all the old science fiction magazines I loved when I was young and write their critical history. I wrote about this in an essay called “Goodbye. Henry J. Kostkos, Goodbye” [Clarion II, edited by Robin Scott Wilson], where I said the project was no longer possible because there was no audience for the old stories, and, in addition, because they were all junk. This was sour grapes. In fact, as you will see, many of the forgotten stories of thirties are neglected gems.

Science Fiction of the 30’s was a success, and it was quickly followed by Science Fiction of the 40’s (1978) and Science Fiction of the 50’s (1979), all three of which were reprinted as oversize trade paperbacks by Avon Books. For the 40’s volume the editing reins were picked up by Martin Harry Greenberg, Joseph Olander, and Frederik Pohl, who assembled a very fine book that still reads well today, with a robot story by Isaac Asimov, a Martian Chronicles tale by Ray Bradbury, a City story by Clifford D. Simak, a classic novella by William Tenn, and Retro Hugo Award nominees by CL Moore, Leigh Brackett, and Fredric Brown.

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Mourning the Loss of a Way of Life

Mourning the Loss of a Way of Life

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REHfrazetta barsoomIt may seem a bit peculiar to write an article about the decline in reading for a site that has done so much to promote the works of writers past and present. Most assuredly, regular visitors to this site are readers. Unfortunately, they are the exception and not the rule in the present day.

During the pulp era, writers were sometimes referred to disparagingly as the Penny-a-Word Brigade. Flash forward to the end of the second decade of the 21st Century and you’ll find far too many pulp writers who would salivate at the thought of earning a penny a word for their efforts. Far too many receive no financial compensation at all, some do not even receive comp copies of their own titles.

The purpose of this article isn’t to disparage small presses that are labors of love for publishers who regularly soldier on year after year failing to turn a profit. When you are a small operation, economies of scale aren’t even a concern. You could publish two dozen titles a year and still lose money. Paying writers or artists is not always possible for those who are in it for something other than financial return.

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The Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe: Expanding the Classic Canon into a New Era

The Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe: Expanding the Classic Canon into a New Era

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Today at Comic-Con International in San Diego, California, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., announced a new series of authorized, canonical novels featuring the myriad characters and worlds from the works of Master of Adventure: the Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe. The new series, which will debut in 2020, represents a number of publishing “firsts” that, as Director of Publishing at ERB, Inc., I am particularly excited to share with Black Gate readers.

The very first first, and the most important, actually begins with an achievement of Mr. Burroughs, who created the first expansive, fully cohesive literary universe. Of course, there were other authors who crossed over their own characters between their novels and series — Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard, for example — but no one before ERB had made such interconnections to the degree that he did. As early as the years of 1913 to 1916 — when writing novels such as The Mad King, The Eternal Lover, The Mucker, The Oakdale Affair, and, arguably, The Man-Eater, the latter featuring a brief cameo from a certain “Mrs. Clayton” at a Central African estate — Burroughs began weaving an intricate tapestry of internal references connecting seemingly disparate works. Soon thereafter came references to Barsoom and John Carter in the “alternate future” continuity of The Moon Maid (written in 1919).

Then, in 1928, while writing Tanar of Pellucidar, Burroughs introduced a character named Jason Gridley, who had invented a transmitter-receiver device that utilized the “Gridley Wave,” thus permitting communication between the Earth’s surface and the world of Pellucidar at its core. Gridley went on to appear or be mentioned in seven more novels, ultimately connecting four of Burroughs’ major series and placing them within the same continuity: the Pellucidar, Tarzan, Barsoom (Mars), and Amtor (Venus) series. These crossovers, combined with the earlier connections Burroughs had made between his novels, eventually created an interconnected universe that encompassed more than sixty books.

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New Treasures: The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Four, edited by Neil Clarke

New Treasures: The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Four, edited by Neil Clarke

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The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume Four-smallI always look forward to Neil Clarke’s Best Science Fiction of the Year, and Volume Four arrived right on time this week. This one is an important milestone in the series for two reasons.

First, it’s the first one to be available in hardcover. That may not seem like a big deal, but it is. It’s a step up in prestige for the series, and it’s great to finally have these books available in a permanent edition. Second, this volume is dedicated to Gardner Dozois, who died last year, and in his thoughtful introduction Neil makes it clear that he will be carrying on Gardner’s tradition of a lengthy annual summation.

I opened this year’s review of short fiction with an important dedication. Few people can be said to have shaped modern science fiction to the degree that Gardner Dozois did over the course of his career. He will most notably be remembered for his time as editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Science Fiction series, but he was also a Nebula Award-winning author. Gardner also won the Hugo Award for Best Editor a record-setting fifteen times and edited dozens of Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award-winning stories. He was also a friend and colleague, working for me as reprint editor of Clarkesworld for the last five years.

On my shelves lies a complete run of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, all thirty-five volumes plus his three Best of the Best volumes, and dozens of other anthologies he edited. While volumes one through three of my series were technically competing with his, he never once made me feel like that was the case. One of the best and more beautiful things most of you don’t know about this field is how collegial it is. Even when the stories were no longer new to me, I always preordered his next volume, simply for his annual summation of the field. For many of us, it was an important history of the field, one that spanned over thirty years and was yet another important part of his legacy.

No one can fill his shoes, but in his honor, I’m going to merge some of the short-fiction-oriented features of Gardner’s introductions into my own. It’s my way of noting that aspect of his work. It’s of personal value to me, and a desire to see that particular torch carried forward.

Neil is as good as his word, and this volume of The Best Science Fiction of the Year contains a lengthy look back at the year in short fiction, broken up into sections such as The Business Side of Things, Magazine Comings and Goings, The 2018 Scorecard — particularly appreciated by stats nerds like me! — The Most Interesting Development for Short Science Fiction, and In Memoriam. I miss Gardner’s idiosyncratic take on the field, of course, but I must say Neil acquits himself very well indeed. His new summation is informative, highly readable, and on-target. I think Gardner would have been proud.

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Goth Chick News: Tales from the Haunted Mansion Book Series

Goth Chick News: Tales from the Haunted Mansion Book Series

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Tales from the Haunted Mansion

Disney parks worldwide have a lot of things in common, namely being the ‘Happiest Place(s) on Earth’, which is why the Haunted Mansion ride may seem like a bit of an anomaly. From Mystic Manor in Hong Kong, to Phantom Manor in Paris, to the Haunted Mansions in Tokyo, California and Florida, each park has a unique haunted house ride. The only park where you won’t find one is Shanghai, where ghosts and the fear of hauntings have a very real place in the Chinese culture.

The first Disney “imagineers” dreamed up the idea of a haunted attraction in the late 1950’s, starting with the story of a “house on the hill” inhabited by 999 ghosts. The actual mansion didn’t open to the public until 1969 and guests were immediately hooked on the experience, though much of the backstory by that time had faded into the background. The attraction gained an enormous cult following, bolstered with oodles of official merchandise and even more homages created by its fanbase. Though hardcore fans can tell you the mansion’s story, which ties together even the minutest details seen in the ride, most visitors simply enjoy the spookiness of the experience without ever knowing the significance of “The Hatbox Ghost,” “The Bride,” and “Madame Leota.”

Until now.

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A Dark Picture of a World Overrun by Technology: Green Valley, by Louis Greenberg

A Dark Picture of a World Overrun by Technology: Green Valley, by Louis Greenberg

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Green Valley Louis Greenberg-smallGreen Valley
By Louis Greenberg
Titan Books (336 pages, $14.95 trade paperback/$7.99 digital, June 11, 2019)

Green Valley follows Lucie Sterling, a detective in a near-future world where the use of technology has been banned by the governing body, Omega. After the “Turn,” those that wished to continue to live within a world manifested through virtual reality were confined to a concrete bunker spanning miles — a place called Green Valley.

Those on the outside, including Lucie, have no contact with those behind the concrete curtain until a series of murdered children with bio and nano tech coursing through their small bodies show up in Stanton. Lucie’s assigned the case but in a completely analog world, how is she supposed to crack it with no evidence other than the bodies left behind?

The case is further muddied by the fact that Lucie’s niece, Kira, is a resident of Green Valley. Worried for her safety, with nothing to go on, Lucie makes the unusual journey into Green Valley to uncover the truth.

Greenberg does a lot of world-building early on that draws the reader in and paints a dark, yet eerily familiar picture of a world overrun by technology. The tension created between the new world order and those that chose a life managed by virtual reality makes the book hard to put down.

For all the detail spent on the story and the characters early on, there’s a lack of balance to it at the end. I wish each character (human or virtual) had the same amount of care spent on wrapping up their own stories, rather than just the multi-faceted Lucie.

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