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Vintage Treasures: The Pirates of Zan by Murray Leinster

Vintage Treasures: The Pirates of Zan by Murray Leinster

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Astounding Science Fiction February 1959-small The Pirates of Zan Ace Double-small The Pirates of Zan Ace Double2-small The Pirates of Zan-small

[Click on any of the images above for bigger versions.]

Murray Leinster is one of my favorite pulp writers. I reprinted one of his earliest tales, “The Fifth-Dimension Catapult,” which first appeared in the January 1931 Astounding Stories of Super-Science, way back in Black Gate 9. Fittingly enough, when I kicked off my investigation of the Classics of Science Fiction line, I started with one of the finest volumes, The Best of Murray Leinster. More recently, I looked at his creepy pulp SF tale “Proxima Centauri” on August 15th.

But none of those is nearly as well known as his classic space fantasy The Pirates of Zan. Because, hello, space pirates. Also, it was blessed with a terrific series of covers over the three decades it was in print. So here we are with another fond look at the work of Murray Leinster.

(While we’re on the topic, why aren’t there more novels of space pirates? The only other ones I can think of are H. Beam Piper’s Space Viking, CJ Cherryh’s Merchanter’s Luck, Piers Anthony’s Bio of a Space Tyrant, and maybe A. Bertram Chandler’s John Grimes novels, at least the ones featuring his recurring adversary Drongo Kane. That’s pretty sad. Seriously, if there are two things that go great together, it’s unexplored space and pirates. Get with it, science fiction.)

The Pirates of Zan was originally serialized (as “The Pirates of Ersatz”) in three parts in Astounding Science Fiction, starting with the February 1959 issue. The famous Kelly Freas cover, featuring a pirate with a slide rule between his teeth, is one of the most beloved Astounding covers of the era. It’s shown at left above.

Don’t ask what a slide rule is, you damn punk kids.

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Fierce and Fey: An Interview with Artist Lauren K. Cannon

Fierce and Fey: An Interview with Artist Lauren K. Cannon

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Baalhu_by_navateI think I first saw Lauren K. Cannon’s art at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, 2011. John O’Neill and I were brainstorming about cover art for Mike Allen’s book and the moment I saw Cannon’s work, I was riveted.

I took home one of her postcards. It’s still pinned up by my writing desk, where I can watch the woman in her bird-skull headdress, kneeling by a bone-embedded riverbed and feeding her creepy little bird friends from bowls of blood.

I love that bird woman. I’d love to write about her, this Baalhu of the Ancients. But even when I didn’t know her name, I adored the bones of her. That’s what Cannon’s art does to me: catapults me from the quotidian into INSTANT STORYBRAIN.

By and by, John bought “Black Bride” to be the cover art for Mike Allen’s Black Fire Concerto. You should have heard the squeals of ecstatic (and perhaps mildly terrified) joy coming from my corner of Rhode Island. John didn’t even need a cell phone, probably. He could’ve just stepped out into his driveway somewhere in Suburbia, Illinois and heard the echoes. I couldn’t have been happier.

And then, as I began this series of Fantasy and the Arts Interviews (1 and 2 here and here), I knew immediately I wanted to interview her.

Cannon very graciously agreed to answer my questions in an email, and here I have them for you, dear Black Gate readers.

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“How Many Psychiatrists Does it Take to Change a Genre?” Karl Edward Wagner in Fantasy 55

“How Many Psychiatrists Does it Take to Change a Genre?” Karl Edward Wagner in Fantasy 55

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Fantasy Newsletter 55-smallI need to spend less time on eBay. A few weeks ago, I stumbled on a collector selling significant lots of vintage fanzines and critical journals from the 70s and 80s — things like Science Fiction Review, The Alien Critic, Fantasy Review, SF Collector, Fantasy, and others.

Hard-to-find-stuff, as I later told my wife Alice, trying to explain why the postman had delivered a 16-pound package and why we were out over two-hundred bucks.

So now I’m in the doghouse. But keeping me company are 87 beautiful magazines packed with news, reviews, artwork, and opinion on the state of fantasy three decades ago, so really, things aren’t so bad. That was probably the height of my book collecting, so there’s lots here that’s of interest. The first one I opened was Fantasy 55, from January 1983, a Locus-like genre news magazine edited by Robert A. Collins. I’d never even heard of Fantasy, so it’s a little humbling to discover it’s clearly a major magazine (which published over 60 issues, apparently). It’s professionally laid out and designed, with lots of art and photos.

Two things I notice right off the bat. First, the cover verges on pornography, with a nude woman sprawled on a bed, getting pretty worked up while some guy with horns drools saliva on her. Eeeugh. Man, the 80s. What can  I tell you.

(A lot of these fanzines feature naked women on the covers. Naked women piloting starships. Naked women battling monsters. Naked women in dungeons. This was the era when a lot of young women avoided conventions due to routine sexual harassment. Think there’s a connection?)

The second thing I notice is the fabulous line-up of contributors, including Fritz Leiber, Darrell Schweitzer, Mike Ashley, John Morressy, Somtow Sucharitkul, and many others. I still haven’t read a third of the articles, but the thing that really opened my eyes was Collins’s editorial, in which he quotes contributor Karl Edward Wagner’s thoughts on the expected fantasy boom following the release of Conan the Barbarian and the genesis of his Kane collection, Night Winds:

Last month… Wagner again attacked fantasy fans, writers, and publishers for their apparent inability to evolve intellectually and/or artistically, for constantly rewarming “the same simple plots and conflicts that were boring Robert Bloch back during Conan’s heyday in 1934.” Both writers and fans, he said, eventually “turn their backs on heroic fantasy,” leaving the field to a new crowd of adolescents. “One would hope for a new sophistication among the readers, and one may grow old hoping.”

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Adventures On Film: Pan’s Labyrinth

Adventures On Film: Pan’s Labyrinth

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Heart of Summer Having panned Merlin some weeks back, it’s time to dive headlong into one of the best fantasy films of this century, and possibly one of the best, period.

Yes, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) is that good. Director Guillermo del Toro, he of Hellboy fame, was clearly out to prove that given solid material, sufficient devotion, and a lack of Hollywood oversight, he could deliver a contender.

True, Pan does invite several divisive questions, such as why must contemporary filmed violence be so jarringly graphic? Del Toro loves jets of blood almost as much as that eternal child-man, Quentin Tarantino, and he indulges himself more than once along his tale’s labyrinthine path. But is it necessary?  Does the vivid bloodletting aid the narrative? Pan is a hybrid, true, a film about war and revolution, and such chronicles cannot easily avoid bloodshed. But as anyone who has ever seen Pan’s sewing and stitching scene can attest, this movie achieves prime “I can’t look!” status. It’s visceral; it hurts.

Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno) also begs a second question, perhaps even more sinister: is it allowable to put a child (or child character) into such peril? Pan doesn’t pull its punches. Our heroine, young Ofelia (played with no affectation whatsoever by Ivana Baquero), is in mortal danger throughout this film, and unlike, say, Harry Potter or Buffy (Slayer of the Dentally Challenged Undead), there is no guarantee she will survive.

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Vintage Treasures: The List of 7 by Mark Frost

Vintage Treasures: The List of 7 by Mark Frost

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The List of Seven Inside Spread-small

I love buying paperback collections. Like this one, which I  found online last week. Just look at at all those gorgeous vintage paperbacks. Seriously, click on that link and look at them. I’ll wait.

Twenty-eight volumes in terrific shape, for less than twenty bucks. Including four early volumes from Neal Barrett, Jr; three vintage Lovecraft collections (one of them The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath); both Ballantine volumes of William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land; one of Lin Carter’s better fantasy collections, Imaginary Worlds; A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool; a smattering of Ursula K. LeGuin, plus C.S. Lewis, Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Bellairs, and half a dozen more. There’s even a beautiful copy of Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space, which I’ve lusted after ever since Violette Malan teased me with the cover in her article on science fiction mysteries last month.

Man, I could just lay these babies down on the floor and roll around in ’em. Except that would probably dog ear the covers.

They finally arrived today, carefully packed in tightly wrapped plastic, and I gently unwrapped them and settled in to examine my new treasures. Many clamored for attention, but the one that practically jumped into my hands was The List of 7, by Mark Frost. That’s the inside front cover above, complete with mummies, gruesome spectres, ghosts, a train chase, and — speaking of Sherlock Holmes — the words “The Game’s Afoot” scrawled on parchment (click for a bigger version).

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When the 21st Century was Far Future: Frank R. Paul: The Dean of Science Fiction Illustration

When the 21st Century was Far Future: Frank R. Paul: The Dean of Science Fiction Illustration

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Frank R Paul The Dean of Science Fiction Illustration-smallI consider Frank R. Paul to be one of the most important — if not the most important — artist in the history of science fiction.

It’s odd then that so few readers today are familiar with his work. Jerry Weist set out to correct that with Frank R. Paul: The Dean of Science Fiction Illustration, a dream project of his that was released only after Weist’s death in 2011.

Paul virtually created American Science Fiction, alongside Hugo Gernsback, in the late 1920s. He was the cover artist Gernsback chose for the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories — every single issue, for over three years, until Gernsback lost control of it in 1929.

That meant Paul crafted many of the defining images of early science fiction, including his interpretation of Buck Rogers (on the cover of Amazing August 1928), H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (August 1927), and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars (Amazing Stories Annual 1927). He made exciting new concepts like space travel, picture-phones, aliens, and robots vivid and real to an America where most people didn’t even own a telephone.

When Gernsback left Amazing behind and founded a new stable of magazines — including Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories — he took Paul with him. Altogether, Paul painted over 300 magazine covers before his death in 1963, most of them for Gernsback.

Paul had numerous artistic firsts. He was the first to paint a space station, for the cover of the August 1929 Science Wonder. He painted the cover for Marvel Comics #1 in October, 1939, giving the world its first look at the Human Torch.

Paul did countless interior illustrations as well. In addition to his striking cover art, he executed a famous series of original paintings imagining life elsewhere in the solar system for the back covers of many of Gernsback’s magazines.

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Adventures on Stage: Fantasy Literature’s Missing Link

Adventures on Stage: Fantasy Literature’s Missing Link

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1002747_514919775228258_344973762_nA few weeks back, I had the good fortune to take in productions of The Tempest and Peter and the Starcatcher at the Utah Shakespeare Festival (Cedar City, Utah). As I drove away afterward, I could not but help thinking that plays, too, are literature, and that more than a passing handful of theater’s best, these two titles included, are outright, unabashed fantasies. Adventures, even.

It is admittedly difficult to keep current with theater, since stagecraft is not, as books, comics, and film/television most surely are, a truly mass media. Access is tricky; productions are both local and fleeting. Also, the habit of theater can be expensive.

Nevertheless, I’m going to make a case, here and now, that Black Gate’s readership should take stock and keep track of contemporary theater. Scripted plays, after all, predate the novel as a form by many centuries, and we would be as blind as Tiresias were we to forget that were it not for Oedipus Rex, we would know nothing of that fantasy staple, the talking, riddling sphinx.

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It’s a Strange Chemistry Book Cover Montage

It’s a Strange Chemistry Book Cover Montage

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Strange Chemistry — publishers of such marvelous titles as Martha Wells’s Emilie and the Hollow World, Blackwood by Gwenda Bond, Pantomime by Laura Lam, Christian Schoon’s Zenn Scarlett, and many others — have produced a montage displaying all of their book covers.

Strange Chemistry is known for their gorgeous cover designs, and this montage of eighteen captures all of them. Sort of makes you want to collect them all, doesn’t it? Click on the image for a full size version.

Strange Chemistry Book Button2

We’re supporters of Strange Chemistry and so we’re reproducing it here with pride. Steal this smaller button for your own blog, and check out all of their books at the Strange Chemistry website.

Art of the Genre: I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Roleplaying Part Three: The Black and Whites

Art of the Genre: I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Roleplaying Part Three: The Black and Whites

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Sorceress PealeI’m not going to stand on a soapbox here and tell you my views on Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, that released this past Christmas; but having seen it, I was prompted to once again take out my old Middle-Earth Role-Playing books and relive what I believe to be the prettiest RPG ever created.

Now I’m not saying that New Zealand isn’t gorgeous, but there is a big part of me that believes literature should stay more firmly based in fantasy, thus real actors and real sets somehow diminish the very nature of the words and images that helped define them in the first place.

In the case of The Hobbit, computers, no matter how sophisticated, couldn’t rekindle the joy I feel from the images I’ve seen painted and drawn concerning Tolkien’s world throughout my youth.

And speaking of youth, I’m constantly reminded that I’m from a quickly aging generation that now seems incredibly antiquated in the world. Technology is moving so fast, it sometimes makes my head spin to think that I grew up without cable television, cell phones, computers, the Internet, microwave ovens, and a plethora of other standard issue American items in today’s world.

I’d like to say that color was something that was always present in my favorite pastime, gaming, but again that would be fooling myself. It wasn’t really until the turn of the millennia that interior color pages were standard issue in gaming. I well remember, back in the late 1980s, how revolutionary FASA was for bringing out color interior images for games like Battletech and Shadowrun, the latter of which actually used glossy pages now found standard on all gaming material.

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Our Comics, Ourselves

Our Comics, Ourselves

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OrcaSeveral years ago, I handed my older son my pile of Avengers comics, a sequential trove dating from about 1976 until about 1985.

He read them eagerly, then threw them all over his room. I provided a storage bin and said, “If you want the privilege of reading these, treat them well.”

Message received. The comics, when not in use, lived happily in their bin.

He’s now re-reading them, out of order. He left a couple of them on his bed the other night, and rather than flip out –– “You’re grounded for life, plus I’m confiscating your cell phone! Oh, wait. You don’t have a cell phone. Hmm. Maybe I should confiscate my own cell phone?” –– I elected to simply remind him that my yesteryear treasures need to be treated well.

Then I forgot all about the reminder. I found myself hooked by the back cover of Avengers #164. It was an ad, of course –– what else would grace the back cover of a Marvel Comic? But what an ad, a movie poster extravaganza for (hold me back) Orca (1977).

With Richard Harris and Charlotte Rampling, no less.

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