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Random Reviews: “The Wonderful Conspiracy” by Spider Robinson

Random Reviews: “The Wonderful Conspiracy” by Spider Robinson

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Cover by Vincent di Fate
Cover by Vincent di Fate

Because I’ve been asked about the process by which I’ve been selecting stories for the Random Review series, I thought I’d take a moment to explain how the stories are selected.

I have a database of approximately 42,000 short stories that I own sorted by story title. When it comes time for me to select a story to review as part of this series, I role several dice (mostly ten sided) to determine which story should be read. I cross reference the numbers that come up on the die with the database to see what story I’ll be reviewing.  This week, I rolled 40,770 which turned out to be Spider Robinson’s short story “The Wonderful Conspiracy.”

One of the things I’m hoping to get out of this series, from a personal point of view, is to discover authors and short stories that I’ve owned and have never read. Of course, I’m also hoping to share those discoveries, good or bad, with the readers of Black Gate.

The Wonderful Conspiracy is the final story of Spider Robinson’s first Callahan book, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon and it has the appropriately maudlin nostalgia of a bar nearing closing time. Robinson has set the story on New Year’s Eve when the bar is mostly empty, save for employees Mike Callahan and Fast Eddie, as well as inveterate drinkers Long-Drink McGonnigle, the Doc, and Robinson’s narrator.

Although “The Wonderful Conspiracy” has many of the signature tropes of a Callahan story, including the series of puns and breaking of glasses, it is a lower energy story, just five men sitting around talking. Set at the end of the year and in a bar that is practically empty, the discussion between the men turns introspective, led by Long-Drink.

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In 500 Words or Less: Midway 2022 Round-Up!

In 500 Words or Less: Midway 2022 Round-Up!

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Becoming Crone by Lydia M. Hawke, Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, and Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales
of Insatiable Darkness, edited by dave ring. Covers by Deranged Doctor Design, uncredited, and Robin Ha

Back by popular demand! As you might have noticed, I’ve been on a serious reviewing hiatus lately due to busy (and exciting) times in both writing and teaching. But I love discussing new books and signal boosting works I think deserve some more attention, so I’m back!

With a caveat, however, that I’m changing my format slightly moving forward. Instead of a regular column discussing one book in five hundred words or less, I’ll be doing a round-up a couple times per year, similar to what I’ve done for my year-end posts. How many books can I mention in five hundred words…? We’ll see. And nobody count, in case I go over.

Thanks as always for reading and for the folks who asked, “when’s your next column, dude?” If you enjoy any of the books I mention, be sure to give them a review of your own on your platform of choice and feel free to let me know here.

In alphabetical order, please enjoy my reading picks for the first half of 2022!

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Flood Monsters and Ghost Riders: The Year’s Best Horror Stories Series VIII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Flood Monsters and Ghost Riders: The Year’s Best Horror Stories Series VIII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

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The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VIII (DAW, July 1980). Cover by Michael Whelan

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VIII was the eighth volume in DAW’s Year’s Best Horror Stories, copyrighted and printed in 1980. This was the first volume edited by horror author and editor Karl Edward Wagner (1945–1994). Artist Michael Whelan (1950–) appears for a sixth time in a row on the cover. I have been very impressed with Whelan’s variety. The covered and walking corpse is a good horrific image for this volume.

All of the authors of The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VIII were male. Eleven were American, four were British, one Belgian (Eddy C. Bertin is back). Wagner included four stories from professional magazines, five stories from books (all anthologies), and seven total stories came from professional fanzines, especially Whispers and Midnight Sun. You get the sense that Wagner searched far and wide for horror stories in the most obscure places.

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Vintage Treasures: The City, Not Long After by Pat Murphy

Vintage Treasures: The City, Not Long After by Pat Murphy

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The City, Not Long After (Bantam Spectra, February 1990). Cover by Mark Harrison

Bantam Spectra was, without a doubt, the imprint where the action was at the end of the last century. Founded by Lou Aronica in 1985, it published some of the very best science fiction and fantasy of the 80s and 90s, including David Brin’s The Postman (1985) and The Uplift War (1987), William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country (1989), Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars (1993 – 96), and a little book titled A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (and its sequels). The imprint was eventually retired in 2009, but not until it had published hundreds of fine books and launched a great many careers.

Pat Murphy published two memorable books with Bantam Spectra, both in 1990, the Philip K. Dick Award-winning collection Points of Departure and the Mythopoeic and Arthur C. Clarke Award-nominated novel The City, Not Long After, a postapocalyptic tale of a depopulated San Francisco.

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The Sillliest Stuff I’ve Ever Read: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

The Sillliest Stuff I’ve Ever Read: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

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HIPPOLYTA

’Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.

THESEUS

More strange than true. I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear?

If you take the time to skim over the history of criticism of William Shakespeare’s sublime A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1596), you might lose your mind. Early commentary seems to have centered on the appropriateness of depicting imaginary beings such as the fairies while more contemporary scholars (say, over the last fifty years) have seen support, as well as opposition, to such things as patriarchy and the “hegemonic order.” All sorts of dark sexual allusions are intimated by several authors.

It’s not all like that, with much focus on metatextual aspects like artistic creation, dream versus illusion, or metamorphosis. Some of this is interesting, some of it ridiculous.

Oh, there are things being said about art, love, and perception, but little of that matters much to me, and none of it matters to the pleasures of the play. For my tastes, the most accurate comment  about A Midsummer Night’s Dream is from Thomas McFarland, who described it as “dominated by a mood of happiness and that it is one of the happiest literary creations ever produced.”

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Exploring Complex Human Themes by Blowing $%#! Up: Teenage Space Mercenary by M. Harold Page

Exploring Complex Human Themes by Blowing $%#! Up: Teenage Space Mercenary by M. Harold Page

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That is a slight oversimplification of M. Harold Page’s mission as a fiction writer. Let’s get the whole thing: “The exploration of complex human themes through the medium of interpersonal violence and blowing $%#! up in space.” If you threw “and magical worlds” on the end, you’d have a pretty good starting description of what most of us Black Gate readers look for in a book.

That may sound a bit flippant, but in fact Page can be deeply thoughtful and historically informed about interpersonal violence. I confess, I’m biased in his favor. Page and I have corresponded off and on over the years, often through comment threads on BG. I’ve reviewed a couple of his books, historicals with a light sprinkling of fantasy elements, both of them great fun.

So when I saw the announcement that he had a new book available for preorder, I had to see it. Now you can find it here.

Which brings us to the cover copy:

Jason is a NetShooter champion. Now he must do it for real.

The teen coding nerd escapes hi-tech slavery only to end up on a gloomy jungle moon guarding an archaeological expedition, literally light years in the wrong direction from the comfortable new life he planned.

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Random Reviews: “Yuli” by Daniel Abraham

Random Reviews: “Yuli” by Daniel Abraham

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Cover by Rovina Cai
Cover by Rovina Cai

“Yuli” is a character study of a mercenary who has retired and is taking care of his teenage grandson. Unexpectedly living in a small house in the US, Yuli has allowed himself to lose the edge he held as an elite mercenary. He sits around his house all day, chain smoking and drinking, occasionally eating at a local diner where some other former mercenaries get together. He listens to his grandson playing a fantasy role-playing game as their conversation comes up through the house’s vents, not fully understanding what they are doing.

Although the role-playing sessions in which the party is preparing to go up against a dragon seems almost like a non sequitur grafted onto the story, Abraham actually builds it as a parallel to Yuli’s own life, with Yuli taking on the role of the first dragon, Aufganir.

Yuli’s life is turned upside down when one of his former companions, Wrona, warns him that some people who they upset several years earlier may have discovered where they are living. Abraham isn’t overly concerned about Wrona’s well-being and, aside from a flashback, he promptly disappears from the story after delivering his warning, but the news wakes Yuri from his dragon-like stupor and he quits smoking and drinking, focusing on getting back into shape, and building up his situational awareness, mirroring the role-playing his grandson’s friends are doing in the basement. …

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New Treasures: Kagen the Damned by Jonathan Maberry

New Treasures: Kagen the Damned by Jonathan Maberry

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Kagen the Damned (St. Martin’s Griffin, May 10, 2022). Cover design by Bob Grom

Jonathan Maberry is a prolific guy, with dozens of science fiction and horror novels under his belt — including ten volumes in the popular Joe Ledger series, which Brandon Crilly described in his Black Gate review as “filled with a host of deeply-imagined heroes and villains… Every novel features some sort of established horror premise and gives it a mad science twist.” As a fervent supporter of mad science, that’s definitely an endorsement I can get behind.

Kagen the Damned is Maberry’s first straight-up adventure fantasy, and it looks like a winner. Publishers Weekly calls it “gripping… peppered with figures from European folklore and monsters from the Cthulhu mythos,” and Fantasy Book Critic describes it as “a violent pulp read, fast and furious, with fantastic ideas and creepy mythos.” In true adventure-fantasy style, it’s the first installment of an epic fantasy series, and that’s okay by me. Here’s an excerpt from the notice at Kirkus Reviews, which labels it “a vibrant, textured, and exciting admixture of subgenres.”

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A Book of Wisdom and Wonder: Aspects by John M. Ford

A Book of Wisdom and Wonder: Aspects by John M. Ford

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Aspects by John M. Ford (Tor Books, April 5, 2022)

John M. Ford died in 2006, not yet 50 years old. He had been publishing SF, Fantasy, poetry, games and nonfiction for some three decades, and his fiction was gaining a reputation, for originality, intricacy, beauty, and cleverness; but he was still not truly widely known. Still, novels like The Dragon Waiting and stories like “Mandalay” (the first John M. Ford work I really noticed), “Walkaway Clause,” “Fugue State,” and “Erase, Record, Play” were highly respected by the cognoscenti. And on places like the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written I heard his friends mention a huge novel he was working, to be called Aspects — all I knew about it was that it was partly about trains (a favorite subject of Ford’s.)

But when he died, everything stopped. His heirs had no connection to the SF world, his agent left the field, and his works fell out of print. People knew that Aspects, unfinished, existed in some form, but hopes for any movement towards publishing it seemed pointless. But in 2019, a journalist named Isaac Butler got interested in his case, and found his heirs, leading eventually to plans to republish his existing works. The Dragon Waiting appeared from Tor in 2020, The Scholars of Night in 2021. And now, in 2022, we have Aspects — his big unfinished novel.

Is it worth it? Oh Goddess yes!

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Vintage Treasures: Life During Wartime by Lucius Shepard

Vintage Treasures: Life During Wartime by Lucius Shepard

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Life During Wartime (Bantam Spectra paperback reprint, July 1991). Cover by Mark Harrison

In April 1986 Lucius Shepard published his famous novella “R&R” in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. It was the tale of young David Mingolla, an American draftee reluctantly fighting a war in a near-future Central America, where psychics predict enemy movements and soldiers are fed a cocktail of experimental combat drugs. It was an immediate hit, nominated for a Hugo Award and winning the SF Chronicle, Locus, and Nebula Awards.

Shepard expanded it into Life During Wartime in 1987, his most successful novel, nominated for the Locus, Dick, and Clarke awards. I read it in the summer of 1988 and found it filled with haunting scenes. It’s perhaps the most memorable SF depiction of war I’ve ever seen, a scathing indictment of American interventionism, with insane A.I’s (who still make more sense than the war), secret psy-ops, a Heart of Darkenss-like trek through a twisted and lethal jungle, and the dark secret of the war’s origins waiting for Mingolla at the end of his harrowing journey.

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