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We Are All Time Traveling Together: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

We Are All Time Traveling Together: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

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The Ministry of Time (Avid Reader Press, May 7, 2024)

Perhaps second only to space travel, science fiction is obsessed with time travel and in particular the paradox that if we go back to the past, how do we affect the future; can we inadvertently or purposely alter our “present”? Sometimes the answer is that your somehow being in the past is essential to determining your present (e.g., Kindred by Octavia Butler where the protagonist travels back to antebellum South to ensure an ancestor stays alive). Other times the innocent butterfly effect (e.g., Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder) has disastrous consequences; even attempting something seemingly good, such as thwarting a presidential assassination, proves catastrophic (e.g., Stephen King’s 1/22/63 ). Then there’s the question of how visitors from the future to our present seek to change future events (e.g., the Terminator movie franchise).

H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine is a canonical SF work because it offers a technology, rather than magical intervention, that enables time travel (hence the title). In addition to its social criticism, The Time Machine is a quintessential adventure tale. The hero enters a strange land populated by equally strange different beings nonetheless still sort of like us, whose use of advanced technology causes disaster. The hero manages escape, but then mysteriously disappears, perhaps in search of something better than what awaits back home.

Which brings us to Kaliane Bradley’s Ministry of Time, in which she reverse-engineers a number of these time travel and adventure tropes.

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Truth, Lies, and Vinyl Wonderland

Truth, Lies, and Vinyl Wonderland

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Vinyl Wonderland (Castle Bridge Media,
June 25, 2024). Cover uncredited

Some months back, I was toiling away in the vast Indiana compound of Black Gate, when I received a text from publisher John O’Neill, who had just finished reading my new novel, Vinyl Wonderland. He told me how much he enjoyed it –– don’t take my word for it, ask him –– and then he told me how sorry he was.

“What for?” I asked.

“Well,” said John, “if you had to live through even half of what your main character went through, then you’ve had one hell of a rough ride.”

I thought about what John had said as I made my nightly rounds of the massive server farm that houses all of Black Gate’s backlogged posts (including over one hundred of mine). Eventually, I crawled off to bed, feeling hopeful that the local kobolds wouldn’t stage another uprising until next month, so that I could get a good night’s rest.

The morning brought clarity, as it often does, and I sat up in bed like a shot. “A liar,” I declared, quoting Quintilian, “should have a good memory!”

Fiction is a lie, after all, spun from gossamer truths, and therefore I, as a writer of fiction, must be a liar. It follows that to succeed in my craft, I must cultivate an excellent memory. Logic (and Quintilian) demand it.

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Remembering Carl Jacobi

Remembering Carl Jacobi

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Revelations in Black by Carl Jacobi (Jove/HBJ, January 1979). Cover uncredited

D.H. Olson delivered this eulogy for Carl Jacobi on Friday, August 29, 1997 at Lakewood Chapel in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was included in Masters of the Weird Tale: Carl Jacobi, published by Centipede Press in May 2014. Our deepest thanks to D.H. Olson for permission to reprint it here, and special thanks to Jerad Walters at Centipede Press for providing the text.

When R. Dixon Smith asked me to speak here today, I was honored, but also somewhat taken aback. There are others, after all, who have known Carl Jacobi both better, and longer, than I. Still, when one is asked to do honor to a man whom one has admired for years, one can hardly say no.

First, to the “facts” as they may be found in the public record.

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A Year of Demonic Public Service: The Fallible Fiend by L. Sprague de Camp

A Year of Demonic Public Service: The Fallible Fiend by L. Sprague de Camp

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The Fallible Fiend (Signet/New American Library, February 1973). Cover uncredited

This is another in my series of looks at fairly obscure SF from the ’70s and ’80s. In this case, I rescued a book that I had bought used decades ago from the chaos of my bookshelves. Most of the other writers I’ve discussed so far have been somewhat forgotten (or were never really known at all) but L. Sprague de Camp is an SFWA Grand Master, and a writer I and many others remember with great affection.

De Camp (1907-2000) began publishing SF in 1937 with “The Isolingual,” and was from the beginning a popular and prolific writer. He wrote both Fantasy and Science Fiction, though by the end of his long career the bulk of his work was Fantasy. His preferred mode was lightly cynical humor — this imbued his SF such as the Viagens Interplanetarias series, and his Fantasy beginning with his Incomplete Enchanter stories written with Fletcher Pratt.

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Beating Heart & Battle Axes – New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine Forges a Book

Beating Heart & Battle Axes – New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine Forges a Book

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Beating Hearts & Battle Axes – A Romantic Sword & Sorcery Anthology seeking funding, championed by New Edge Sword & Sorcery magazine. Cover Art is by M.E. Morgan

New Edge Sword and Sorcery Magazine, championed by Oliver Brackenbury, has emerged over the last few years to provide a market with “love for the classics, and an inclusive, boundary-pushing approach to storytelling.”  Black Gate has featured the crowdfunding for and reviews of the initial volumes (link).  Today we highlight a crowdfunding endeavor that is in progress now, set to end on July 20th: a collection of six stories called Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes. Starting with this new anthology, Oliver Brackenbury (Publisher) & Jay Wolf (Editor) will carry that same approach into the Brackenbury Books lineup. It’s a bold meeting of Sword & Sorcery and the current zeitgeist in fantasy publishing: Romantasy. Some of the stories get quite spicy, too!

Check out the Beating Heats & Battle Axes campaign now!

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Lovely Ladies and Pleistocene Behemoths: A Visit to the Hollow Earth with Edgar Rice Burroughs

Lovely Ladies and Pleistocene Behemoths: A Visit to the Hollow Earth with Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Caroline Munro, and a pair of Pleistocene behemoths, in At the Earth’s Core

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with “hollow earth” stories, a style of fantasy fiction that presents ancient, lost societies of people (and/or humanoids) living deep under the earth, where Jurassic and Pleistocene behemoths — as well as uncategorized horrors — struggle to survive in the subterranean jungles of a sunless world.

My favorite of this genre is the Pellucidar series, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which began in 1914 when At the Earth’s Core was serialized in All-Story Weekly, before the novel was published in book format.

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Triangulating Moving Targets: Equimedian

Triangulating Moving Targets: Equimedian

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Equimedian (Hex Publishers, February 6, 2024). Cover artist unknown

When we first meet Jason Velez, the protagonist of my alternative-1970s novel about science fiction, fandom, and the unskeining of reality itself, he’s in a bad way. By the end of Equimedian’s first chapter, he enumerates seven things he wants to change in his life. The list kicks off with a call to action to sell off the bulk of his SF paperbacks. The reasons Jason offers seem straightforward enough: he needs cash, and he’s tired of hauling around thousands of books.

But is there more to it than that?

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Christopher Moore and His Very Dirty Job

Christopher Moore and His Very Dirty Job

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When talking about banning books, nobody mentions Christopher Moore. No doubt Moore is upset about this, because he’s out to offend pretty much everybody. The fact that he does this with glee, panache, and massive gobs of bathroom humor probably doesn’t signify, and certainly won’t save his neck when the book-banning trolls finally come for him. The fact is, he’s funny, and there’s nothing the book-banners hate more than a healthy sense of the absurd.

An excellent case in point is Moore’s A Dirty Job, in which unassuming Charlie Asher, a second-hand dealer in San Francisco, becomes a “death merchant,” a sort of dogsbody for Death, who, it seems, has left the field, possibly never to return. It’s Charlie’s job to match dying people with their “soul vessel,” usually some knick-knack or other with sentimental value, in part so that the dead can find rest, and in part to prevent Orcus, lurking in the sewers, from eating up the soul vessels and rising again to usher in an age of darkness and doom.

That’s right, Orcus. Our old friend from the original AD&D Monster Manual. Etc.

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A Lovely Work of Magic & Mystery: Vinyl Wonderland by Mark Rigney

A Lovely Work of Magic & Mystery: Vinyl Wonderland by Mark Rigney

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Vinyl Wonderland (Castle Bridge Media, June 25, 2024). Cover artist unknown

Vinyl Wonderland is Mark Rigney’s new novel. It’s told by an older Brendan Purcell, about some strange happenings back when he was 17, having just dropped out of high school for… reasons. Which will become clear. His life is a mess — his mother died suddenly, his father is drinking terribly, and has lost his job. And Brendan too is drinking constantly, and has also lost his job. But he has a new one — helping out at Vinyl Wonderland, a used record store. This is 1984, when records were still the primary means of buying music. (It’s also a time I was haunting used record stores!)

Shortly before Christmas, Vinyl Wonderland owner Karl asks Brendan to take over for a few days while he tends to his hospitalized mother. And he warns him — have nothing to do with the “Elvis door” — a locked door behind an Elvis cardboard standup in the rear. And for a while, Brendan complies, even though some people, including the town’s mayor, importune him to let them through the door. Meanwhile both Brendan and his dad are drinking even more, and we learn a bit about Brendan’s life — he’s a good soccer player, but other than that not much of a student, and apparently a terrible person. How much of this — the drinking, the bad attitude, the downright mean stuff he admits to — is in reaction to the loss of his mother, and how much was already part of him, isn’t clear.

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Conan: City of the Dead, John C. Hocking’s Living Plague is Alive Inside

Conan: City of the Dead, John C. Hocking’s Living Plague is Alive Inside

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Conan: City of the Dead, by John C. Hocking (2024, Titan Books. 507p)

It’s June of 2024, and Titan Books has just delivered John C. Hocking’s City of the Dead which contains both Conan and the Emerald Lotus (1995, TOR) and its follow-up Conan and the Living Plague — a book lost in the limbo of publishing craziness for ~two decades! Hocking also wrote a bridging novella set in between these two novels called “Black Starlight” (serialized across Conan comics in 2019, and provided assembled as an eBook in 2023 as Conan: Black Starlight: The Heroic Legends Series).

Since Titan Books & Heroic Signatures had the rights to publish and print “Black Starlight” separately, it seems like a lost opportunity to have it absent from  City of the Dead, but fans are just glad to finally see the Living Plague in print, it is tough to whine about that.

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