Black Gate

I had been reading science fiction for four or five years before I actually ran across any of the science fiction magazines. I was aware that they existed, and was extremely interested in reading them, but never saw them in bookstores. I now attribute this to the fact that bookstores generally put genre magazines with the magazines and not with the books (where I had been looking for them), and also to the fact that I wasn’t super-bright.

Anyway, when I finally found the magazines, I was a little disappointed. The first one I bought, which is still around the house somewhere, was the F&SF for December 1973. It had an adventure novelet (sic) by Jack Williamson and a more literary piece by a new-to-me author named James Tiptree jr.– “The Women Men Don’t See” was the more-ironic-than-I-knew title. Other stories included an entertaining Shelley-esque pastiche by Gary Jennings, and Richard Lupoff’s “12:01 P.M.”, which still seems to me the most nightmarish horror story I’ve ever read. Then there were the features: a snarky film review by Baird Searles, a science article by my then-hero Isaac Asimov and a cartoon by someone named Gahan Wilson, surely one of the greatest Wilsons of this or any other age. So any complaints I had were not about content. No, it was just that the thing was so cheaply made: the coarse brownish paper on which it was printed was particularly off-putting; the digest size seemed strange–neither booklike nor magaziney. I bought it, read it, enjoyed it, kept it, soon was a subscriber to the magazine, but I was dissatisfied. It didn’t match the shining Platonic ideal I’d somehow formed of genre magazines. Now I know I was looking for something like the luminously maculate pages of Black Gate, but back then all I knew was that there was a painful gap between the real and the ideal, a lesson I’ve been forgetting and relearning ever since.

[More voyages in shelf-discovery beyond the jump.]

…

Read More Read More

This is a strange book about a strange event in a strange time. In the summer of 1835, the first successful penny paper in New York published a series of articles documenting an extraordinary series of discoveries by the most famous astronomer in the world, John Herschel (son of the even-more-famous William Herschel). With the aid of a new optical technology and the pristinely clear skies over the Cape of Good Hope, Herschel had discovered life and, indeed, civilization on the moon.

The reason why these discoveries never came up in the recent 40th-anniversary celebrations of the Apollo moon landing is, of course, the moon landings were faked by the people who would later forge Obama’s birth certificate the truth is out there pyramids were built by Atlantean space aliens from SPA-A-A-ACE they didn’t really happen. The editor of the New York Sun, Richard Adams Locke, needed money. The publisher of the Sun, Benjamin Day, wanted to increase circulation–and wasn’t averse to money either. Day paid Locke to write a series of articles about the supposed “discoveries” of Herschel. Day never admitted that he knew the stories were false, but Locke eventually confessed both that he wrote them (they were originally published anonymously), and that they were false. By the time of his confession, everyone knew this, but when the articles first appeared it seems as if almost everyone took them at face value.

It was the golden age of hoaxes. The world and people’s understanding of it were being transformed by new science and technology. The penny paper, a primitive medium to our way of thinking, allowed information (or misinformation) to spread wide and sink deep into the awareness of an urban population. People were excited by the possibilities of the new world they were entering, threatened by its dangers, and eager on both counts to learn whatever they could about it.

[Hic, haec, hoax: beyond the jump.]

…

Read More Read More

Internet kerfuffles almost inevitably become incestuous loops of recursion and fail–and, if not, they’re hardly any fun at all. But John Scalzi’s response to Adam Roberts’ complaint about this year’s Hugo slate at least led me to do one thing: I ordered Roberts’ Gradisil, which I’ve been meaning to read for some time.

The rest of my reaction is sort of a-plague-on-both-your-houses-ish. I cannot take seriously complaints about a shortlist from people who could have participated in shaping it but did not. This is not an original observation: it was made by a number of people on Roberts’ blog, on Scalzi’s blog and elsewhere. And when it arises, someone always replies, “Oh, I’ve heard that before.” As if that were some kind of answer. You have heard it before because it is true. No one listens to people who sing the blues without paying their dues.

[Meta-kvetchery abounds beyond the jump.]

…

Read More Read More

Who was the greatest American fantasist of the 20th century? People will have their own notions about this (as opposed to the greatest British fantasist of the 20th century, where most lists will begin with Tolkien). Personally, I think Fritz Leiber is several of the century’s greatest fantasists, and other obvious candidates would include Robert E. Howard, Kuttner and Moore, Leigh Brackett, Jack Vance, Ursula Le Guin. John Crowley has his advocates; no doubt there are others. One name I always think of in this connection is Roger Zelazny.

Zelazny was not a perfect writer. He was an avowed risk-taker, and some of his experiments didn’t come off. Others, which may have read well when they were first written, haven’t aged gracefully. His motto was “Trust your demon,” and demons aren’t always trustworthy. But Zelazny’s method (put less theologically: writers should be prepared to junk their outlines and follow whatever wild hairs present themselves) does tend to take the reader interesting places. Almost no one had heard of Zelazny before 1962. A few years later he was an acknowledged giant in the sf/f field. By end of the decade people were saying he was on the skids. De gustibus non disputandum. In my view (and many others) few fantasists will ever reach the heights Zelazny achieved in his later period.

In any case, his historical importance is beyond dispute, and when an sf/f author of historical importance needs an archival collection, you have but to wait politely and eventually NESFA Press will produce something stunning on the order of “The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny”. (Volume One and Two are the subject of this review; Volumes Three and Four are now out; Volumes Five and Six are slated for release later this year).

[Showers of sparky details beyond the jump.]

…

Read More Read More

Apologies for my radio silence last week. Candidly, I was at a loss for a subject, until Fate and Amazon put the perfect book into my hands (which I’ll talk about below), which wasn’t until sometime late in the week.

And, with further apologies, here’s a self-pimping update: there’s still time to participate in the discussion of Blood of Ambrose at Stargate producer Joe Mallozzi’s blog.

As to the “perfect book”–the new issue from Paizo Press’ Planet Stories line, Henry Kuttner’s Robots Have No Tails, may not be perfect in some absolute sense (although it comes pretty close) but it’s certainly one that I and others have been looking forward to for years. And it’s only the latest (hopefully not the last) in a series of Kuttner reprints from Planet that now includes Elak of Atlantis, his pioneering sword-and-sorcery stories, and The Dark World, probably the best of his swashbuckling adventure tales. (I say “probably” only because I can’t claim to have read all of Kuttner–maybe no one has, although Planet publisher Erik Mona has certainly come closer than most.)

[Sagrazi the unvastenable beyond the jump.]

…

Read More Read More

Not about myth this week, exactly, but legend–the sort of myth that begins as historical fact.

I was googling randomly to escape the weariness of my days and nights and I ran across the Wikipedia entry on Gráinne Ní Mháille (a.k.a. Grace O’Malley, a.k.a. the Pirate Queen of Ireland).

An account is given of the queen’s encounter with a certain Tudor pretender to the throne of Ireland.

[Legend meets punchline after the jump.]

…

Read More Read More

You know that you’re an argumentative person when you feel the impulse to argue with something you agree with. This happens to me on an daily, or even hourly, basis. Today’s case in point is a slice from China Miéville’s recent and (justly) much-linked post, “Five Reasons Why Tolkien Rocks”:

“For those of us who regret the hegemony of the Classicists’ Classics, the chewy Anglo-Saxonisms of Mirkwood and its surrounds are a vindication. We always knew these other gods and monsters were cooler.”

This, of course, is the sound of my ox being gored… by my own damn ox: I’m a big fan of both mythologies (and others besides).

[Monstrous quibbling beyond the jump.]

…

Read More Read More

Joe Mallozzi’s online book club is reading Moorcock’s The Stealer of Souls this month (there’s already been some discussion here; Moorcock himself will appear as guest today, Wed. 6/10/09). So I thought I’d say a few words about the book… but which book is it, anyway?

That’s not a rhetorical question. Geeky details beyond the jump, cobbled together from various copyright pages, the wise words of Mr. Wikipedia, and other stuff I read somewhere once or heard someone say.

…

Read More Read More

Should magic in fantasy fiction have a freakish perplexing quality that stands outside of reason or should it be a kind of alternate science, a para-physics (or para-chemistry or whatever) for a universe with physical norms that differ from ours?

This has been on my mind lately, for various reasons. And (like most people) when I think of the poetics of fantasy, I think of 18th C. skeptical philosophers.

…

Read More Read More

Dreams with Sharp Teeth was more than a quarter of a century in the making; the first footage was shot in the early 1980s and was used in a PBS special; the film-makers kept coming back for more until they had a feature-length documentary (including lots of older material) which premiered in April 2007. It’s about someone named Harlan Ellison. If you have never heard of him, this movie is not your best possible introduction to one of the great American fantasists. If you are one of the legions of people who hate Harlan J. Ellison’s guts, you will not want to see this movie, unless you enjoy the sensation of hating the guts of someone lots of other people seem to love. Anyone not in these two groups will probably find stuff to like and dislike in this movie.

Harlan Ellison escapes from various perils and lives happily (if somewhat angrily) ever after. That was an unannounced spoiler. More details beyond the jump.

…

Read More Read More