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A to Z Reviews: “Alexandria,” by Monica Byrne

A to Z Reviews: “Alexandria,” by Monica Byrne

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A to Z ReviewsMonica Byrne offers a romance in her story “Alexandria,” which was published in the January 2017 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Aside from being set in the future, there is very little about the story that reads as science fiction.

Beth Miyake is coming to terms with the death of her husband, Keiji. Through her memories of him, the reader learns that while they had a deep love for each other, it manifested itself in ways which were not obvious to outsiders. Beth’s family never understood their relationship and Keiji tended to be quiet when the two of them weren’t alone.

When they were along, they understood each other perfectly, although Beth could never understand why Keiji insisted that she memorize and then destroy the love poems that he wrote for her, refusing to allow her to discuss them with anyone else. They were emblematic of their love for each other.

Aside from one disappointing trip they took for their honeymoon, the two didn’t leave Kansas. Upon arriving in Alexandria, Egypt on that trip, they discovered that the Lighthouse of Alexandria had been destroyed seven centuries earlier. It had never occurred to them that it was no longer standing. Since then, their travels had been done virtually through reading books about the places they would never physically visit.

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Neverwhens: Hannibals’ Ghost(s) roams a City of Marble and Blood and a Genre is Reborn

Neverwhens: Hannibals’ Ghost(s) roams a City of Marble and Blood and a Genre is Reborn

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The Chronicles of Hanuvar: Lord of a Shattered Land and The City of Marble and Blood
by Howard Andrew Jones (Baen, August 1, 2023 and October 3, 2023). Covers by Dave Seeley

Friends, Carthaginians, Dog-Brothers, I come to praise Howard Andrew Jones, not to bury him…

That was a lot of mixed-metaphors, but Howard’s mixed a lot of themes, tropes and reached back into the very roots of early heroic fantasy in his Chronicles of Hanuvar to breathe new life into what was considered a dead sub-genre, so perhaps appropriating Marcus Antonius’s funeral oration for Caesar and mentioning the Republic’s greatest rivals is appropriate.

Howard Andrew Jones is the leading Sword & Sorcery author of the 21st Century, and the growing saga of Hannuvar of Volanus (promised to be a five-volume series by Baen books) is his masterwork. The saga is the story of Hanuvar, the aging, last general of Volanus. Once a great city-state and naval power, Volanus has fallen to the legions and sorcery or the aggressive Dervan Empire.

Determined to make Volanus an object lesson to other nations, Derva leveled the city, scattered its stones, and carried its remaining survivors away in chains. But Derva has not reckoned with Hanuvar.

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A to Z Reviews: “Simple Sentences,” by Natalie Babbitt

A to Z Reviews: “Simple Sentences,” by Natalie Babbitt

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A to Z ReviewsNatalie Babbitt first published “Simple Sentences” in her collection The Devil’s Other Story Book, which includes a variety of tales about humanity’s encounters with the Devil. The book is a follow-up to her collection The Devil’s Story Book, so there are plenty of tales for Babbitt’s fans. This particular story was selected by Terri Windling for inclusion in The Year’s Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection, which Windling co-edited with Ellen Datlow and became the first volume of the twenty-one volume series that was later called The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

Best known for writing the novel Tuck Everlasting, Babbitt clues in the reader with the first line that “Simple Sentences” will be a humorous story. The demons processing new arrivals to Hell are having trouble determining what to do with two men who arrived simultaneously. One of the men is a professional pick pocket, the other an author of complex books the surpassed the understanding of readers.

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Bringing a Whetstone to an Old Blade: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine #1

Bringing a Whetstone to an Old Blade: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine #1

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New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Fall 2023. Cover by Caterina Gerbasi

Disclosure: I was a Backer for the first four issues of this new journal.

As with the Zero issue, New Edge has absolutely fantastic, journal-level production values: heavy paper stock, trade or hard-cover binding, 8.5 x 11 stock, clean, professional layout, and absolutely terrific artwork. It looks great, feels great in the hand and has nothing amateurish about it. Whereas a counterpart magazine, Tales From the Magician’s Skull, has similar production quality but leans into a 30s pulp-retro vibe intentionally, NESS has a much more contemporary vibe, which fits its idea of taking a venerable genre and recasting it for modern audiences. (Which it does to varying degrees of success.)

So, looks great. How’s the contents?

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A to Z Reviews: “Fire in the Dark,” by Alex Azar

A to Z Reviews: “Fire in the Dark,” by Alex Azar

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A to Z ReviewsOver the past several years, I’ve embarked on a series of year-long review cycles at Black Gate. In 2018, I reviewed a story-a-day to coincide with an author whose birthday it was. In 2022, I selected stories completely at random from my collection to review. In both of those cases, the projects served to find forgotten and minor works of science fiction that spanned a range of years. They also served to make me read stories and authors who I haven’t read before, even if they were in my collection.

For this year’s project, I’ve compiled a list of all the stories and novels in my collection. I then identified the first and last works for each letter of the alphabet and over the next twelve months, I’ll be looking at those works of fiction, starting with Vance Aandahl’s “Bad Luck” and ending with David Lee Zweifler’s “Wasted Potential.” Looking at the 52 works (two for each letter), I find that I’ve only reviewed one of the works previously. Interestingly, given the random nature of the works, only three novels made the list, while four anthologies have multiple stories on the list. The works range in publication date from 1911’s “The Hump,” by Fernan Caballero to Zweifler’s story from last year.

The final story in my collection by an author whose name begins with an A is Alex Azar’s “Fire in the Dark,” which appeared in the anthology Wyrms, edited by Eric Fomley in 2022. Wyrms is a collection of drabbles, a literary format in which a story is told in exactly 100 words. In the interest of transparency, I should note that my story “Best Policy” also appears in Wyrms. I’ll also note the last word of this sentence (including the introduction) is the 300th word of this article.

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A to Z Reviews: “Bad Luck,” by Vance Aandahl

A to Z Reviews: “Bad Luck,” by Vance Aandahl

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A to Z ReviewsOver the past several years, I’ve embarked on a series of year-long review cycles at Black Gate. In 2018, I reviewed a story-a-day to coincide with an author whose birthday it was. In 2022, I selected stories completely at random from my collection to review. In both of those cases, the projects served to find forgotten and minor works of science fiction that spanned a range of years. They also served to make me read stories and authors who I haven’t read before, even if they were in my collection.

For this year’s project, I’ve compiled a list of all the stories and novels in my collection. I then identified the first and last works for each letter of the alphabet and over the next twelve months, I’ll be looking at those works of fiction, starting with Vance Aandahl’s “Bad Luck” and ending with David Lee Zweifler’s “Wasted Potential.” Looking at the 52 works (two for each letter), I find that I’ve only reviewed one of the works previously. Interestingly, given the random nature of the works, only three novels made the list, while four anthologies have multiple stories on the list. The works range in publication date from 1911’s “The Hump,” by Fernan Caballero to Zweifler’s story from last year.

To kick off the series, we start with Aa, specifically, Vance Aandahl’s story “Bad Luck,” which appeared in the November 1989 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Throughout his thirty year career, the majority of Aandahl’s short fiction initially appeared in that magazine.

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More Tales of Twilight and Borderlands : Time of Passing by John Gaskin

More Tales of Twilight and Borderlands : Time of Passing by John Gaskin

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Time of Passing by John Gaskin (Tartarus Press, August 20, 2023)

This is the fifth and apparently the last collection of short stories by John Gaskin, an excellent author of ghostly tales who has been entertaining and fascinating his readers for more than twenty years. Most of his books have been published by the independent British press Tartarus Press. An elegant, classy imprint for an elegant classy writer.

In the present volume Gaskin reproposes a few of his previous stories in a revised version.

“The Gathering “ is the masterful report of the dramatic last reunion of a group of friends during a frightening storm, while “Avernus” is a dark, unsettling story revolving around a mysterious and dangerous amulet.

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A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

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If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

Ebenezer Scrooge

 

A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, published first in 1843, is nearly two hundred years old, and nothing remains to be said about it, it would seem. Charles Dickens’s fairy tale has become one of the great secular staples of the Christmas season. It’s been filmed many times; both wonderfully as in the Alastair Sim 1951 and George C. Scott 1984 versions and less wonderfully in the Reginald Owen 1938 film and the 2010 Jim Carrey motion capture monstrosity. Furthermore, there have been animated adaptations, musicals, and comics. It’s an isolated person, I suspect, who doesn’t know at least the basic setup: the uplifting story of a cold-hearted miser who turns to the good after the visitation of a trio of ghosts representing the spirit of the season. All I can do is comment on the bits that stood out for me while liberally quoting from this mordantly funny novel and Gothic fantasy of redemption.

The story is told by an omniscient narrator who intrudes on the story constantly, digresses from the narrative, and questions the reader at every turn. The opening words of A Christmas Carol, or at least a fair gloss on them, are well-known, particularly the seventh sentence: “Old Marley was a dead as a door-nail.” It’s a blunt matter-of-fact statement that lets the reader know where things stand. The narrator, though, immediately continues with something else.

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From Mystery to Horror: Darker than You Think by Jack Williamson

From Mystery to Horror: Darker than You Think by Jack Williamson

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Darker Than You Think (Fantasy Press, 1948). Cover by A. J. Donnell

Jack Williamson had an impressively long career in science fiction, from the pre-Campbell era into the twenty-first century. His first sale, in 1928, was to Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories; his last book came out in 2005, the year before his death at 98. Darker than You Think is one of the high points of that career, published in 1948 as a novel expanded from a 1940 novella that appeared in John W. Campbell’s fantasy magazine Unknown.

Despite this venue, though, Darker than You Think is highly rationalized “fantasy,” to the point where it’s more accurately described as science fiction. Near the end of the novel, an important secondary character, Sam Quain, tells the protagonist that “supernatural” really means “superhuman.”

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Family Secrets, Ancient Curses, and Haunted Rooms: Fantasmagoriana Deluxe, edited by EJ Guignard & LS Klinger

Family Secrets, Ancient Curses, and Haunted Rooms: Fantasmagoriana Deluxe, edited by EJ Guignard & LS Klinger

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Fantasmagoriana Deluxe (Dark Moon Books, November 28, 2023). Cover art by Hellduriel

The history of Fantasmagoriana is rather complicated.

Originally the book was published in German as a ghost story collection, then translated into French in 1812. The first English translation under the title Tales of the Dead by Sarah Elizabeth Utterson appeared in 1813, but Utterson omitted three stories and added one written by herself, “The Storm,” which frankly is an unremarkable, weak imitation of some of the original tales included in the anthology.

The current volume, Fantasmagoriana Deluxe, includes all the stories featured in the two books Fantasmagoriana and Tales of the Dead, some of which were read aloud by Mary Shelley and her friends during the famous party at Villa Diodati (Switzerland) where Lord Byron suggested that the guests try their hand creating some new ghostly fiction. The more famous results of that challenge were Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Vampyre by JW Polidori.

But so much for history. Let’s move to the stories, which are all outstanding.

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