Jerome Bixby was born on January 11, 1923 and died on April 28, 1998. His story “It’s a Good Life” was adapted into an episode of The Twilight Zone and The Twilight Zone Movie. He wrote scripts for four episodes of Star Trek, including “Mirror, Mirror,” and co-wrote a story with Otto Klement which became the basis for the film Fantastic Voyage. He served as the editor of Planet Stories from mid 1950 through July 1951 and went on to serve as Horace L. Gold’s assistant at Galaxy.
When he first envisioned the story that became “The Holes Around Mars,” he was planning on what is now known as flash fiction ending with a joke. He discussed it with Gold, who convinced him to stretch it out and in the writing, he extended it again until it took its present form. It was first published in Galaxy in the January, 1954 issue, edited by Horace L. Gold. The story has been reprinted numerous times and translated into French, German, and Italian.
Most days in 2018, I’ll be selecting an author whose birthday is celebrated on that date and reviewing a speculative fiction story written by that author.
George Alec Effinger was born on January 10, 1947 and died on April 27, 2002. He was married three times, the second time to artist Beverly Effinger and the third time to science fiction author Barbara Hambly. He was a John W. Campbell, Jr. finalist in the award’s inaugural year and the Southern Fandom Confederation presented him with the Phoenix Award in 1974. His story “Schrödinger’s Kitten” received the Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Award in 1989. Effinger wrote the popular Budayeen series, comprised of several short stories and the novels When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss. He also wrote pastiches of several types of pulp adventure stories featuring his character Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson.
His short story “Albert Schweitzer and the Treasures of Atlantis” was written for Mike Resnick’s alternate history anthology Alternate Warriors, in which each story takes an unlikely historical figure and turns them into a fighter. The story has never been reprinted.
I need to find some new superlatives for the books I read. Too often I fall back on “terrific” or “awesome” or just plain “great.” Those are all stalwart words, but after I’ve described two or three books with them, it just seems lazy to describe the next two or three with the same exact words. I do it to make clear I liked a particular book and that I think it’s worth Black Gate readers’ attention, but it’s really lazy of me to just keep using the same superlatives again and again. That said, James Stoddard’sThe High House (1998) is exceptional, superb, and top-notch.
The High House of Evenmere is
a truly beautiful pile of building, all masonry, oak, and deep golden brick, a unique blend of styles — Elizabethan and Jacobean fused with Baroque — an irregular jumble balancing the heavy spired tower and main living quarters on the western side with the long span flowing to the graceful L of the servants’ block to the east. Innumerable windows, parapets, and protrusions clustered like happy children, showing in their diversity the mark of countless renovations. Upon the balustrades and turrets stood carved lions, knights, gnomes, and pinecones; iron crows faced outward at the four corners. The Elizabethan entrance, the centerpiece of the manor, was framed by gargantuan gate piers and pavilions, combining Baroque outlines with Jacobean ornamentation.
The building “is the mechanism that propels the universe, (. . .) If the Towers’ clocks are not wound their portion of Creation will fall to Entropy.”
Lord Ashton Anderson is responsible for protecting the High House. The foremost enemy of the house is the Society of Anarchists, led in the field by the Bobby, a man dressed in the uniform of a police constable and with a face from which the features sometimes vanish, leaving him looking like a “faceless doll.”
The story, though, is not Lord Anderson’s, but his son Carter’s. When Carter is nearly killed and the Bobby steals the Master Keys, Lord Anderson sends his son away for safety. Carter doesn’t return for fourteen years, during which time his father vanished while on expedition in the land of the Tigers of Naleewuath.
Algis Budrys was born on January 9, 1931. He died on June 9, 2008. In addition to his career as a writer, Budrys edited and published the magazine Tomorrow, first in print and later on-line. He was also active in promoting the Writers of the Future contest and wrote a long-running and very influential book review column in Galaxy Magazine entitled Benchmarks, many of which were collected into book form in 1986. He was a Guest of Honor at LoneStarCon 2, the 1997 Worldcon in San Antonio. Budrys was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 2007 and received the Pilgrim Award for lifetime contribution to SF and fantasy scholarship from the Science Fiction Research Association the same year. In 2009, he received one of the inaugural Solstice Awards from the SFWA.
“Silent Brother” was first published under the pseudonym Paul Janvier in the February 1956 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. and was reprinted five months later in the British edition of the magazine. When Judith Merril included it in SF: The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy Second Annual Volume the next year, it was attributed to Budrys. Budrys included it in his collections Budrys’ Inferno,The Furious Future, and Entertainment. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg included it in The Great SF Stories #18. The story has been translated into German and French.
Jack Womack was born on January 8, 1956. His novel Elvissey, the fifth book in his six-book Drycoseries, received the Philip K. Dick Award in 1994, tying with John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless. Womack has also worked in New York as a publicist in the publishing industry.
“Audience” was written for the anthology The Horns of Elfland, edited by Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, and Donald G. Keller. It was reprinted in Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Eleventh Annual Edition the next year and again in 2001 by Mike Ashley in The Mammoth Book of Fantasy. The story was nominated for the World Fantasy Award.
“Audience” was originally written for an anthology about music and Womack took that idea and decided to explore the importance and ephemeral nature of sound. His character tries to seek out smaller museums when traveling, avoiding the large, well-known places like the Louvre in favor of out of the way places which offer unknown exhibits. One of these museums is the Hall of Lost Sounds, which contains small rooms which allow visitors to hear collected sounds which no longer can be heard in their natural place.
Just as Proust noted how smells can trigger memories, Womack uses sounds to do the same thing. His curator gives a tour of the museum, commenting on where in his own life each of the lost sounds come from. The story also points out that sounds can change over time. A person’s voice as a teenager sounds different from their voice as an adult, and without recordings, completely vanishes. Even with recordings, the way a person hears their own voice can never be recaptured.
“Audience” is less a story and more a slice of life rumination which teaches the reader to examine their senses and memories in new ways.
Most days in 2018, I’ll be selecting an author whose birthday is celebrated on that date and reviewing a speculative fiction story written by that author.
Hayford Peirce was born on January 7, 1942. He began publishing short fiction in 1974 with the story “Unlimited Warfare.” He published his first novel, Napoleon Disentimed in 1987. “Mail Supremacy” was first published in Analog in March, 1975 and grew out of a joke letter that Peirce sent to editor Ben Bova, who encouraged him to develop the letter into a story.
The oddly named protagonist is an anagram for Peirce’s own name. The story has been reprinted in Lester del Rey’s Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Fifth Annual Collection, 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, edited by Joseph Olander, Martin H. Greenberg, and Isaac Asimov, Analog’s Lighter Side, edited by Stanley Schmidt, Imperial Stars 1: The Stars at War, edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories, edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowic, and Martin H. Greenberg. In 2001, Peirce collected the story, along with five other stories featuring Chap Foey Rider into the collection Chap Foey Rider: Capitalist to the Stars, published by Wildside Press. In 1979, the story was translated into Dutch and Italian.
Hayford Peirce’s “Mail Supremacy” is a short, light-hearted story in which Chap Foey Rider begins to wonder about the mail system and how it works. Rider, who runs an import company in New York, laments the loss of multiple deliveries a day and further notes that it seems that something mailed from a shorter distance takes longer to reach its destination than something mailed from a longer distance. He is more likely to receive a letter from his office in Los Angeles first than a letter mailed from nearby Boston.
He begins to test this by having his office managers mail letters and tracking their time in transit. Once he is sure that letters mailed far distances are being delivered quickly, he takes it to the illogical extreme and tries to mail letters to Alpha Centauri. “Mail Supremacy” doesn’t take itself seriously at all and in some ways is a satire on the idea of a Galactic Federation, even as it served Peirce as a starting point for his own series of stories about a Galactic Federation.
In August of the first year of the reign of Emperor Titus Flavius Caesar Vespasianus Augustus, the volcano Vesuvius erupted in the south of Italy and destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Thousands of lives were lost. Out of the fire, ashes, and pyroclastic flows, an Italian film subgenre was born.
The 1959 film The Last Days of Pompeii (Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei) is the most famous of the many journeys Italian cinema has taken into the story of Vesuvius’s first-century eruption. Ostensibly based on Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s bestselling 1834 novel, the movie is a sword-and-sandal (peplum) riff that departs freely from its source so it can work as a vehicle for new megastar Steve “Hercules” Reeves. Reeves was at the height of his stardom and the peplum genre was also approaching the summit of its commercial success. There were loopier and cheesier days ahead for sword-and-sandal movies — I would argue more fun days — but for class and cash, The Last Days of Pompeii is a pinnacle. It lumbers sometimes under the weight of trying to appear like a serious prestige picture, but the lust for action entertainment carries it along. If you want to watch a dead serious epic from the same year, you have Ben-Hur. If you want to watch masses of polystyrene walls and pillars rain down on the cast and a hero slay lions and crocodiles, stay here.
Mario Bonnard is credited with directing The Last Days of Pompeii, but he fell sick on the first day of production. The man who took over the job was the assistant director, Sergio Leone. Yes, that Sergio Leone. Leone already had extensive experience working on Hollywood epics shot in Rome, including Quo Vadis. He proved he could helm a big feature with The Last Days of Pompeii, and soon after landed his first credited director job on another peplum, the fantastic romp The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), which I humbly submit is the pest peplum of all time. Two years later, Leone jump-started the genre that would surpass sword-and-sandal movies as the Next Big Thing in Italy with his Western, A Fistful of Dollars.
Although the eruption of Vesuvius is the reason the film was made, its story works as an ancient Roman drama even without the volcano. This isn’t a modern disaster film where the volcano is a constant subject of speculation with the actual on-screen disaster consuming the entire last third. Vesuvius appears in a few matte paintings and receives almost no mention again until the last ten minutes, when it interrupts the finale in the amphitheater to become the big curtain-closer. Forget the former plot, everybody run away!
Most days in 2018, I’ll be selecting an author whose birthday is celebrated on that date and reviewing a speculative fiction story written by that author.
Cover by Alex Schomberg
Eric Frank Russell was born on January 6, 1905 and died on February 28, 1978. His story “Allamagoosa” was awarded the second Hugo Award for Short Story and in 2000, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. His story “A Great Deal of Power” was originally published in Fantastic Universe in August/September, 1953, edited by Sam Merwin, Jr. It has been reprinted several times, occasionally under the title “Boomerang.”
Russell sets “A Great Deal of Power” in a twenty-first century in which Germany is governed by a Sixth Reich, three scientists have determined that the way to avoid bloody wars is to create a way of causing the death of powerful men who refuse to give up power. They have successfully done so, building their technique, which they don’t actually understand, into a humanoid robot named William Smith. They dispatch Smith to kill a short list of powerful men by simply asking them to give up power. If the men refuse, Smith’s mystical ability will automatically cause the men to die, apparently from natural causes, in a short time.
Most days in 2018, I’ll be selecting an author whose birthday is celebrated on that date and reviewing a speculative fiction story written by that author.
Tananarive Due was born on January 5, 1966. Her Ghost Summer: Stories received the British Fantasy Award for Best collection in 2016 and the title story previously won the Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society. Due received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation in 2013. Due is married to fellow author Steven Barnes.
“Suffer the Little Children” was originally published in The Touch, a shared world anthology of short stories by various author set in a world suffering from Depriver Syndrome and created by Steven-Eliot Altman. It has never been reprinted.
Steven-Eliot Altman created the idea of Depriver Syndrome and introduced it in the anthology The Touch: Epidemic of the Millennium published in 2000, inviting several authors to write stories set in a world in which a person’s touch could deprive someone of one of their senses. Altman went on to publisher a novel, Deprivers, set in the same world.
Tananarive Due’s contribution to the anthology is the short story “Suffer the Children,” in which Laurel returns home from a shopping trip to discover that her house has been taken over by a group of children. As she tries to figure out what is happening, one of the children touches her and Laurel loses her sight. The children lock her into a room with her granddaughter, Gwen, who was blinded by the Deprivers before Laurel arrived home.
Most days in 2018, I’ll be selecting an author whose birthday is celebrated on that date and reviewing a speculative fiction story written by that author.
Cover by J.K. Potter
Ramsey Campbell was born on January 4, 1946 in Liverpool. His story “The Chimney” won a World Fantasy Award in 1978 and two years later he won again with his story “Mackintosh Willy.” Additional World Fantasy Awards came for Best New Horror, which he edited with Stephen Jones, and the collection Alone with the Horrors, which also won a Bram Stoker Award. His essay collection Ramsey Campbell: Probably also won a Bram Stoker Award. He has won the British Fantasy Award twelve times, more than anyone other than Stephen Jones.
Campbell’s first published story was “The Church in High Street” (1962), which I included in my 2003 anthology Horrible Beginnings, which reprinted the first stories by various horror authors. His story “No End of Fun” was originally published in J. K. Potter’s Embrace the Mutation, edited by William Schafer and Bill Sheehan and published by Subterranean Press in 2002. Campbell also included it in his collection Told by the Dead the next year and it was selected by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling to appear in their annual The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.
Ramsey Campbell’s “No End of Fun” probably had a dated feel, at least to American readers, when it was first published. It tells the story of Lionel, who is visiting the boarding house run by his cousin Dorothy’s daughter, Carol, for the first time since Dorothy’s funeral. The story follows Lionel’s attempts to connect to Carol’s thirteen year old daughter, Helen, who sees his visit as a chance to escape the drudgery of helping her single mother run the boarding house as well as a chance to spend time with the boyfriend her mother has forbidden her to be with. Lionel attempts to take her to a carnival, only to watch her run off to go on rides with her boyfriend while he tries to win her a prize. The next night, he winds up going to the theatre alone, giving her instructions to meet him when the show is over so they can return to the boarding house together.
Although his cousin Dorothy is not the focus of his attention during the trip, her presence is never far from his mind. He is staying in her room and occasionally sees her image in an old mirror located in the room. Lionel notes that Helen resembles Dorothy in ways Carol never did.
