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Vintage Treasures: Men, Martians, and Machines by Eric Frank Russell

Vintage Treasures: Men, Martians, and Machines by Eric Frank Russell

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Men Martians and Machines-smallLast Sunday, I posted the latest article in my Ace Double series, this time focusing on Sentinels of Space by Eric Frank Russell and Don Wollheim’s The Ultimate Invader.

It made me realize that I’ve given precious little coverage to Eric Frank Russell over the years — really, a pretty serious oversight, considering what a fine writer he was. So I thought I’d remedy that here, starting with his 1955 volume Men, Martians, and Machines.

Men, Martians, and Machines is something of a problem child for catalogers. Wikipedia lists it as a novel, but it’s really not — it’s a collection of four linked stories, three published in Astounding during World War II, and one original. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database entry for Russell lists it as neither a collection nor a novel, creating a separate category for it.

In some ways the book is an early precursor to Star Trek. The stories follow the exploits of the rough-and-tumble crew of the solar freighter Upskadaska City, known more commonly as the Upsydaisy, who follow their Captain as he takes charge of one of the first faster-than-light starships, the Marathon. Captain McNulty leads his mixed crew of humans, jovial tentacled Martians, and one robot on voyages of discovery to far stars and strange alien planets.

Star Trek fans will certainly enjoy these proto-Trek stories and see how they influenced that seminal series two decades later. For me, these tales represent something even more primal. When I think of Golden Age robot stories, I think of Asimov; when I think of military science fiction, I think Heinlein. When I think of tales of brave exploration and camaraderie in the face of the vast mystery and terror of deep space, I think of Eric Frank Russell.

It’s his unique voice, I think, and the poetry and humanity of his prose, mixed with all the marvelous ray-gun trappings of pulp science fiction, that makes him such a joy to read. Here’s a snippet from the first story, “Jay Score,” as our unnamed narrator meets with the imposing new emergency pilot shortly after blast off.

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Art of the Genre: The Dreaming Work of Travis Hanson

Art of the Genre: The Dreaming Work of Travis Hanson

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poster2final2My suggestion, assuming my AotG followers ever listen to me, is to go here and do what you must.  Seriously, find some change in your pocket and put it somewhere that is worthy.  I find I can’t help but support incredible artists, especially those willing to tell a beautiful story for children and adults alike.  So hurry and add this to your ‘what I did in 2014 that was worth something’ list.

Ok, now that you’ve made the world a better place, I’ll do the same by talking a bit about the art of Travis Hanson.

Trav, as he’s known to me, decided he wanted to do a comic, but he didn’t have any place to put it.  Luckily for him, and so many creative people, the Internet gave him the opportunity to share his talent and vision, for free, with people across the globe.  Thus, a few years back, The Bean was born.  Fast forward to now and you’ve got Fifteen Chapters and 579 comic pages of incredible fantasy adventure all at your fingertips for ZERO dollars and ZERO cents!

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Vintage Treasures: Sentinels of Space by Eric Frank Russell / The Ultimate Invader edited by Donald Wollheim

Vintage Treasures: Sentinels of Space by Eric Frank Russell / The Ultimate Invader edited by Donald Wollheim

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Sentinels of Space-smallWe’re back  with our journey through the Ace Double line, this time with one of the earliest volumes in the series: Eric Frank Russell’s SF novel Sentinels of Space, coupled with a Donald Wollheim anthology The Ultimate Invader. It was published in paperback in 1954.

Eric Frank Russell is one of those writers I’m not nearly as well-versed in as I should be. I read his brilliant short story “Dear Devil” in Terry Carr’s YA anthology Creatures From Beyond in the mid-seventies, when I was in Junior High, and that’s all it took for his name to stick with me.

“Dear Devil” — rejected by all the major magazines until Bea Mahaffey pulled it from the slush in 1950, while filling in for the hospitalized Ray Palmer at Other Worlds — established Russell as a major name and it also cemented the 26-year-old Mahaffey’s rep as an editor. She remained as co-editor of Other Worlds when Palmer returned and also edited his magazines Science Stories and Universe Science Fiction in the late 50s.

Russell wasn’t terribly prolific. He wrote only eight novels between 1939 and 1965, plus a posthumous collaboration with Alan Dean Foster, Design for Great-Day (1995), published 17 years after his death. I’m sure there’s a fascinating story behind that — I’ll have to ask Alan next time I run into him at a convention.

His two most famous works are probably his first novel Sinister Barrier, which so impressed John W. Campbell that he reportedly founded Unknown magazine just to get it into print, and “Allamagoosa’ (Astounding, May 1955), the first short story to win the Hugo Award.

My favorite Eric Frank Russell anecdote occurred while I was selling vintage paperbacks in the Dealer’s room at the 2012 Worldcon here in Chicago (Howard’s detailed report is here.) Jo Walton — who won a Hugo the next day for her novel Among Others — was browsing my books when she suddenly let out a shout of glee.

She explained why in a funny and delightful post a few months later at Tor.com., titled “The Book You Don’t Know You’re Looking For.”

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Art of the Genre: I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Roleplaying Part Four: The Maps

Art of the Genre: I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Roleplaying Part Four: The Maps

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MIddle-EarthHave you ever designed a campaign and thought to yourself, ‘Damn, this is so good, I should build a company on it?’ Well, certainly you aren’t the only one, and dozens of game companies have been born from folk’s home brew campaigns, but it wasn’t until very recently that I realized that I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Role-Playing was born of the same ilk.

Now before you all go running off to Twitter about Tolkien being a RPG nerd, you have to have the full understanding of what I’m talking about. First and foremost, Tolkien WAS NOT a gamer, but that didn’t mean that his world wasn’t ripe for table-top role-players to want to explore in the mid to late 1970s.

One case in particular came out of the University of Virginia in 1977, when then student Pete Fenlon decided he wanted to create a role-playing game around Tolkien’s world for some friends on campus.

My first question upon finding this out was, ‘Why didn’t you just play D&D?’ and Pete’s answer was simple: D&D simply wasn’t Tolkien. As an avid camper and backpacker, as well as a member of the SCA, Fenlon understood way too much about Tolkien to throw a campaign into a world of negative integer armor classes and D20 to-hit charts.

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The Waterloo Panorama: An Epic Example of Military Art

The Waterloo Panorama: An Epic Example of Military Art

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Marshal Ney leading his troops.
Marshal Ney leading his troops.

The Napoleonic era has always fascinated me for its visuals — the massive armies, the colorful costumes, and the sweeping scope of some of the battles. These terrible conflicts produced some of the finest military art in European history and I discovered a remarkable example of it when I visited Waterloo, Belgium, last week.

Preserved on the battlefield is a rare example of a panorama. A popular form of entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these large paintings are now rare. They were usually of epic scenes such as battles or Biblical stories or famous cities, and would be placed on the inside of round buildings to provide a 360 degree viewing experience. Others were set up on stage and unrolled like a scroll in front of the audience, each part relating a sequence of the story.

The Waterloo panorama is set in a round building and is 110 meters long and 14 meters high. It was painted by Louis Dumoulin and his assistants in 1912, just as those newfangled moving pictures were beginning to make panoramas obsolete.

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Art of the Genre: David Trampier, 1954 – 2014

Art of the Genre: David Trampier, 1954 – 2014

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1509880_10153982624460584_2120060224_nToday is a day of mourning for those gamers who were brought into the industry during the ‘great launch’ of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in 1978. That year the AD&D Player’s Handbook hit the market, and nothing in the life of role-playing would ever be the same again. One reason, and certainly one of the most recognizable not named Gygax, was the cover art by David Trampier. On Monday, March 24th, Mr. Trampier passed away in southern Illinois at the age of 59.

That age in itself is a tragedy, but one that can only be further exacerbated by what could have been for a man many gamers considered the great white whale of RPG fantasy artwork.

More words than can easily be counted have been written about Trampier over the years, most hypothesis and some truths, but in the end all we know now is that he is gone.

As an adept in the industry of RPG artwork, I’ve made it my life’s calling to track down bygone artists. But Trampier was never one of them. Sure, I’ve spoken in depth to his relations, and even as late as last August had a lengthy conversation with a group of RPG power brokers on the best course of action to approach him, including old friends on a road trip and private detectives, but in the end Trampier was even too far removed for me, and honestly I can’t say whether that now makes me happy or sad.

What I do know it that in the late 1980s, during his run with the Wormy comic for TSR’s Dragon magazine, Trampier suddenly went off the grid.  At the time, he’d have been only 34 years of age, and smack in the middle of his prime as an artist. Now, 25 years later, he is gone, and not a single shred of artwork was produced by his hand over the course of those intervening years.

Now that brings me profound sadness.

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The Art of Shamanism

The Art of Shamanism

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Shaman’s costume and drum, next to a photo of a sacred tree.

The eastern Spanish city of Valencia is rich in museums. Besides the usual archaeology, history, and military museums, there are quirky ones like the Toy Soldier Museum and the one true Holy Grail at Valencia Cathedral. There are also several art museums and galleries. While visiting last year, I came across an exhibition on shamanism at the Valencian Museum of Enlightenment and Modernity.

Titled “Between the Worlds: Shamanism in the Villages of Siberia,” the exhibition brought together more than two-hundred objects on loan from The Russian Museum of Ethnography. Most were collected around the turn of the last century, before the Communist Revolution led to a national effort to stamp out shamanistic practices.

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Vintage Treasures: The Dunwich Horror and Others by H.P. Lovecraft

Vintage Treasures: The Dunwich Horror and Others by H.P. Lovecraft

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The Dunwich Horror Rowena-smallBack in December, in the comments section of my post on “H.P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt, and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D,” Joe. H. noted:

My first encounter with Lovecraft was the… paperback of Colour Out of Space. I was probably too young and had no idea what I was in for — the title story scared the bejeebers out of me (and to this day still creeps me out)… it was actually the Jove edition; the one with the Rowena painting of a Great Old One from “Shadow Out of Time” on the cover. Needless to say, it was the cover that drew me.

(Hmmm … Rowena also pulled me to Clark Ashton Smith with her City of the Singing Flame cover.)

Naturally, I went searching for evidence of a Jove edition of The Colour Out of Space, and it didn’t take long to find. In the process I also discovered the companion volume, The Dunwich Horror. Both were published by Jove in 1978; see them side-by-side here.

This is why I love collecting paperbacks. I have the Arkham House three-volume set of Lovecraft’s collected fiction in hardcover, but I still find different editions delightful — particularly the compact and inexpensive paperbacks, and especially when they’re as eye-catching as these two. Rowena is a very gifted artist and her interpretations of a Great Old One (on The Colour Out of Space) and Wilbur Whateley (for The Dunwich Horror and Others) are wholly unique and vibrantly real.

Of course, the other reason I love collecting paperbacks is the joy of the hunt, and by late December I was on a hunt for both volumes.

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The Gargoyles of St. Wulfram’s

The Gargoyles of St. Wulfram’s

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DSC00165_2Of all the freakish critters in the original hardback Monster Manual, the one that always made the most intuitive sense to me was the gargoyle. Having seen perhaps more than my share of gargoyles by the time I entered the role-playing realms, I already knew them to be fierce, frightening, toothy, amply clawed, and sometimes winged. It stood to reason that they’d be crafty, pernicious opponents.

What made no sense was why the D&D variety weren’t made of stone, as nearly all true (read: real) gargoyles surely are. To this day, I still have no explanation for that decision on the part of the Monster Manual’s creators, Mssrs. Gygax, et al. They certainly had no intrinsic objection to stone beasties: consider the stone golem or that durable tri-form oddity, the xorn.

In order to better address this incongruity, I have abandoned my regular offices deep in Black Gate’s vast Indiana Compound and taken up residence at Harlaxton Manor, an out-of-the-way 1830s edifice set in the rolling hills of England’s Lincolnshire. Is it haunted? Probably. Not only did one of its previous owners conduct regular séances in the cozier of the two libraries, but the manor has been used in several eccentric movies, including The Ruling Class (1972) and the truly execrable remake of The Haunting (1999).

Are there gargoyles? Yes. But only two.

Luckily, just down the road, in the struggling industrial town of Grantham, an astonishment of gargoyles awaits on the walls of St. Wulfram’s, a mid-sized Anglican church that dates back to the 1200s at least.

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Vintage Treasures: Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D. Simak / Cosmic Manhunt by L. Sprague de Camp

Vintage Treasures: Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D. Simak / Cosmic Manhunt by L. Sprague de Camp

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Ring-Around-the-Sun-Clifford-D-Simak-smallClifford D. Simak was one of the first science fiction writers I ever read and, in discovering him, in a very real way I also discovered science fiction.

Simak would probably be marketed as a Young Adult writer today (if any of his work was still in print.) One of his first novels, Ring Around the Sun, also became one of the first Ace Doubles, and it was a significant success.

The New York Herald Tribune called it “Easily the best science-fiction novel so far in 1953,” and in the highly-regarded survey Trillion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove labeled it his best book, alongside Simak’s better-known classic City.

More recently, Ring Around the Sun featured prominently in Stephen King’s 2001 bestseller Hearts in Atlantis. When eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield gets an adult library card for his birthday, it’s one of the first books he checks out. The mysterious dimensional traveler Ted Brautigan, on the run from the minions of the Crimson King and renting the upstairs apartment, approves of Bobby’s choice.

“I have read this one,” he said. “I had a lot of time to read previous to coming here.”

“Yeah?” Bobby kindled. “Is it good?”

“One of his best…In this book,” he said, “Mr. Simak postulates the idea that there are a number of worlds like ours. Not other planets but other Earths, parallel Earths, in a kind of ring around the sun. A fascinating idea.”

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