 |
 |
 |
January index
February index
March index
April index
May index
June index
July index
August index
September 1, C.J. Cherryh: “The Unshadowed Land”
September 2, Roland J. Green: “Strings”
September 3, Jack Wodhams: “Freeway”
September 4, Rick Wilber: “Greggie’s Cup”
September 5, James McKimmey, Jr.: “Planet of Dreams”
September 6, China Miéville: “Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopedia”
Theodora Goss was born on September 30, 1968.
Goss has won two Rhysling Awards for Long Poem. The first was in 2004 for “Octavia Is Lost in the Hall of Masks” and the second for “Rose Child” in 2017. She has also twice been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Mythopoeic, the Seiun, and the World Fantasy Award, winning the last once. She has additionally been nominated for the William L. Crawford/IAFA Fantasy Award, the SLF Foundation Award, and the Compton Crook Stephen Tall Memorial Award.
Goss wrote “Singing of Mount Abora” for John Klima’s anthology Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories in 2007. The story was picked up by Rich Horton for Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition and by Jonathan Strahan for The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Two. It was late reprinted in Lightspeed by John Joseph Adams in the July 2012 issue. The story won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 2008.
“Singing of Mount Abora” was written for an anthology in which all the stories are inspired by words that were the winning entries in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, so it is appropriate that Goss’s language is a feature in the story, which was based on the word “Dulcimer,” which won the contest for Kim Calvin in 1949. The story is also based on lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” notably “ A damsel with a dulcimer/In a vision once I saw:/It was an Abyssinian maid/And on her dulcimer she played,/Singing of Mount Abora.”
Goss weaves together two tales set in three different times. The first is the story of Kamora, a woman in ancient China who has fallen in love with the Cloud Dragon, but cannot marry him until she convinces the Empress to let her leave. The second story tells of Sabra, a literature student who is beginning to fall in love with another student, Michael, much to her distant mother’s disdain. Both Kamora and Sabra must overcome obstacles set by the Empress or Sabra’s mother in order to have the chance to be with their loves.
The story of Kamora and the Cloud Dragon reads like a fable. Kamora is in service to the Empress who won’t let her leave until she can find someone who will entertain her as much as Kamora has. Kamora goes on a quest, starting with her uncle, the man who made her dulcimer. Known for his cleverness, he sends her to a distant mountaintop where she can meet the Stone Woman who may be able to help her, for the right price.
Escape from L.A. was almost the final film in John Carpenter’s career. He wasn’t enjoying filmmaking as much as he once did, and retirement was looking more attractive. There was also a depressing feeling that movie trends were passing him by — the master’s students had started to take over genre filmmaking. But when Largo Entertainment approached him about directing an adaptation of John Steakley’s 1990 novel Vampire$, the director couldn’t resist the chance to take another crack at making a Western using another genre. The popularity of vampire films had surged in the late 1980s and through the ‘90s. One of the biggest vampire movie hits and a significant influence on the approaching superhero boom of the 2000s, Blade, came out the same year as Vampires.
Blade is arguably one of the problems Vampires ran into when it was released the day before Halloween. Although opening strong at #1, Vampires suffered an enormous second week drop and barely made back its production budget in the US. Younger audiences apparently wanted to see the slick black trenchcoat vampire-hunting heroics of Wesley Snipes in a modern city rather than a grungy ode to Italian Westerns starring James Woods. (The CinemaScore rating of audience reactions to Vampires was a dismal D+. Blade got an A-.) The film that horror magazines had touted throughout the year as John Carpenter’s comeback ended up hastening his retirement.
Jack Crow (James Woods) is the leader of a vampire-slaying squad working for the Vatican to eradicate the plague of bloodsuckers across the southwestern US. After his team wipes out a vamp nest in New Mexico, the master vampire (Thomas Ian Griffith) slaughters all of Crow’s team while they’re boozing it up at a nearby motel. Only Crow and Montoya (Daniel Baldwin) escape. They take along Katrina (Sheryl Lee), a prostitute who was bitten by the vampire. Crow plans to use Katrina to track down the master and kill him. The Vatican assigns a new priest to work with Crow, Father Adam Guiteau (Tim Guinee), as they hunt for the powerful vampire, who is none other than Jan Valek, the first vampire ever created. Valek is seeking for an object hidden somewhere in the Southwest that will allow him to complete his original reverse exorcism and become the first vampire capable of walking during the day. Crow and Guiteau hunt desperately while Montoya becomes ensnared by Katrina.
…
S.N. (Shariann) Lewitt was born on September 29, 1954. She has also published as Rick North and Gordon Kendall, the latter in collaboration with Susan Shwartz.
Lewis has published under her full name as well as her initials. Her novels include original works such as Angels at Apogee, Rebel Sutra, and Memento Mori, as well as the Star Trek novel Cybersong. She collaborated with Shwartz on the novel White Wing and has written two books in The Young Astronauts series as Rick North.
“Festival” appeared in the Summer 1994 issue of Pirate Writings, edited by Edward J. McFadden. It was reprinted in The Best of Pirate Writings: Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction, also edited by McFadden.
Lewitt has set “Festival” on an alien world settled by humans. The early settlers found the world to be an inhospitable place with a jungle that seemed practically sentient and intent on destroying the colony. Eventually, technological means were invented to keep the jungle from encroaching on the colony and at the same time a raucous annual festival emerged, which invariably resulted in the deaths of some of the revelers. Secret Societies sprung up to find those who died in the revels and take their bodies outside as a tribute to the jungle.
Sandro is preparing not only for the festival, donning a costume like all the other revelers, but also for his induction into the Red Men’s Society. The story talks about his preparations and then goes into a lengthy flashback to give the reader the history, intentionally vague, of the planet and the festival, before connecting Sandro to his sponsor for membership in the Red Men’s Society, his co-worker Chema. The two men go out on patrol, looking for the bodies of the dead to drag out into the jungle while wearing full environmental suits so they won’t have to worry about their own exposure.
The short length of the story combined with its flashback nature gives it a disjointed feel. Lewitt is not able to give sufficient coverage to either the origins of the colony’s culture nor to Sandro and his desire to become part of the Red Men’s Society or his reaction to the secrets he is exposed to. While his reaction to those secrets is one which seems completely human and normal, it doesn’t seem to take the colony’s values into consideration.
Michael G. Coney was born on September 28, 1932 and died on November 4, 2005.
Coney won the 1977 British SF Association Award for his novel Brontomek! and was also nominated in 1984 for his novel Cat Karina. In 1996, his story “Tea and Hamsters” made the ballot for the Nebula Award for Best Novelette and two of his stories, “Die, Lorelei” and “The Sharks of Pentreath” were nominated for Seiun Awards.
“The Byrds” first appeared in the 1983 anthology Changes, edited by Michael Bishop and Ian Watson. In 1985 Judith Merril selected it for inclusion in the inaugural volume of the Tesseracts anthology series of Canadian science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery also included the story in The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990. The story appeared the following year in David G. Hartwell and Glenn Grant’s Northern Stars: The Anthology of Canadian Science Fiction. It made its most recent appearance in Mike Ashley’s The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy.
Michael Coney takes a look at mass hysteria in “The Byrds,” in which a Canada which is struggling with population problems sends out questionnaires to the elderly which encourage them to choose euthanasia. In one family, as Gran gets on in years, she refuses to kill herself and instead strips naked, paints herself like a bird, and straps on an anti-gravity belt before taking to the trees to the mortification of her family.
The family calls in a psychiatrist, Dr. Pratt, who seems more intent on writing papers, appearing on television, and generally making a name for himself than helping the family. As the word spreads about what Gran did, others begin doing the same and Gran becomes an unwilling and uncooperative guru for the movement following her lead.
Having just come out of the 1969 Retro-Reviews, AND Black Gate Book Club’s 1981 Downbelow Station, I wanted to dip into the modern SF/F scene a bit before starting the 1979 Retro-Reviews. I delved into Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2018. I’ll be talking about the fiction and poetry in this review, spoiler-free, but skipping book review columns and such.
This is a somewhat special issue, with stories inspired by (or matching) the excellent Bob Eggleton cover art “Big Mars.”
Darlene Ritika works on the Bradbury Space Center, orbiting Mars, in this alternate history tale. She is hiding a severe case of vertigo from her superiors and co-workers and gets called out by the Man to go to Phobos and find an entrance to a series of secret caves. They find a cave, but discover they are not the first people to be there. A slow-motion chase/fight ensues in the low gravity. With the heart of the story being such a slow scene, the story in its entirety seemed really rushed to me.
Before we begin this review, you might still be on the fence about whether or not to even start reading this series. If so, there’s a list of eight great reasons to start the series, with number 7 being the very best of them.
The way this last mini-series has been set up is that Matt Wagner will release four monthly issues, take a one-month break, release four more monthly issues, then another one-month break, four more monthly issues, a one-month break, then the final three issues. While this process allows everyone involved a bit more breathing room when putting out a regular series, it also ends up creating three extra-special cliffhangers. What that means for issue 12 is that we’re getting to the last special cliffhanger of the series before Matt Wagner finally powers through to the big finale.
It opens with Magda and Hugo stuck on a platform, being attacked by snake women. Last issue, we saw Magda’s Mary Poppins umbrella trick. This issue, we see her Penguin umbrella trick as she uses it as a gun to melt two of them before another one destroys it.
Meanwhile, the Umbra Sprite takes a dip in her pool of darkness in order to gather even more power, stating that “The Three” MUST be united for the plan to work. Of course, she still has no idea about who exactly composes “The Three,” although she’s fairly sure that Kevin and the Fisher King are two of them. Before submerging, she essentially places Karol in charge, warning her that “Sasha is a vain and vapid creature” and “Zophia (is) a slave to her own cruelty.” She then informs her most trusted daughter that all four of the remaining Gracklethorns must be prepared to fight and likely to die in the coming struggle. Given that she murdered one of her daughters in the previous issue, there’s no doubt that the Umbra Sprite is prepared to sacrifice all of them to achieve her goals. It’s also clear that the daughters so fear the Umbra Sprite that they’re willing to die rather than defy her.
Elsewhere, Kevin and Miranda are pursuing the mysterious imp. Despite knocking down some trees, Kevin loses not only the imp, but also the Questing Beast, who slips through a magic portal, sealing the portal behind itself. Even worse than losing their quarry, the magic mirror that Isis gave Kevin to stay in touch with Magda has been cracked.
Tanya Huff was born on September 26, 1957.
Huff has won the Aurora Award twice. Her first Aurora was in 1988 for her short story “And Who Is Joah?.” She won the second in 2013 for the novel The Silvered. Huff has also been nominated for several Gaylactic Spectrum Awards as well as the William L. Crawford – IAFA Fantasy Award, the Sapphire Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award.
“Finding Marcus” was written for the anthology Sirius: The Dog Star, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Alexander Potter in 2004. The story was reprinted in 2007 in Huff’s collection Finding Magic and again in 2013 in the collection He Said, Sidhe Said & Other Tales.
Reuben is a dog in in “Finding Marcus.” As the title implies, he is attempted to find his master, Marcus, from whom he has become separated. Their separation is not a normal one, for several reasons. Marcus had been working on a project to find Gates between dimensions and when he was eventually successful, he brought Reuben with him. Unfortunately, Marcus learned that the Gates are only one way and they would have to find and pass through several Gates before returning to their own world.
In their passage through the Gates, Reuben managed to acquire the ability to understand human speech, and speak as well, although whether he can speak to Marcus is left ambiguous. The worlds they pass through are a mixture of hi-tech, low-tech, and mid-tech, with our own timeline apparently considered mid-tech. The two became separated when they appeared in a low-tech marketplace and Marcus was accused of being a demon. In trying to escape, Marcus and Reuben learned that in order for a Gate to deposit them in the same location, the two had to be touching, leading to Reuben’s quest.
As Reuben focuses his quest on finding each Gate to take him to the next world and eventually Marcus, which Reuben knows will be the eventual outcome, Huff explores the pitfalls of being a dog alone in the world. The danger posed by people, either well-meaning or not, the hunt for food, the avoidance of traffic, and the seeming ever-presence of cats. Although Reuben is happy to be searching alone, he winds up connecting with a crow, Dark Dawn With Thunder, who can also speak and wants to hear Reuben’s story. Even as Reuben tries to push Dawn away, the crow insists on helping him find the next Gate, offering him advice and warnings from her position in the sky and forging a bond with Reuben that he refuses to acknowledge, just as he refuses to accept Dawn’s pessimistic view of the ultimate success of his quest.
It’s been a bit of a shock, even if a somewhat welcome one, to be done with Glen Cook after so many weeks. I’ve been so immersed in the world of the Black Company that it feels a little weird to be moving on. Fortunately, I was able to turn around and pick up the brand new collection containing all of Clifford Ball’s short stories. Who’s Clifford Ball, you ask? Well, let me tell you. Actually, let Dave Ritzlin tell you:
Little is known about Clifford Ball. His brief career as a writer began in 1937. Ball, a devoted reader of Weird Tales since 1925, was deeply upset by the suicide of Robert E. Howard the previous year. Presumably Howard’s death motivated him to pen sword-and-sorcery stories of his own in an attempt to fill the void left by the departed master. “Duar the Accursed” appeared in the May of 1937 issue of Weird Tales, and the influence of Howard was readily apparent.
Ball wrote two more S&S tales, followed by three non-S&S fantasies, and then vanished back into the audience from which he’d arisen. A short bio from Weird Tales stated he worked all sorts of jobs, including ditch digger, factory worker, and barkeep. According to Wikipedia, he might have been born in 1896 and probably died in 1947. And that’s it. That’s all that seems to be known about one of the earliest S&S writers.
All Ball’s S&S tales take place in the same land of ancient kingdoms, beautiful queens, conniving wizards, and demonic powers. The use of the same place names and gods in all three make it seem as if he was beginning to develop a coherent setting, but with so few stories the world doesn’t get the chance to come fully to life. As with Henry Kuttner’s Atlantis setting, Ball’s was headed in the right direction but he didn’t get the chance to achieve it, and it’s a shame. There’s a creative exuberance to these stories that make me wish Ball had carried on.
“Duar the Accursed” features its titular protagonist, and on the surface he’s an easily recognizable Conan clone. What makes him different is his mysterious past — he has no memory before awaking on a battlefield some years ago. Since then he’s taken to a roving life, but one shadowed by dark omens, including a raven that dogged his pirate galley and earthquakes that leveled a kingdom he ruled.
As the story begins he’s been captured by Queen Nione of Ygoth. He has come to her land to steal the fabled Rose of Gaon — “a jewel magnificent in size and beauty” — from the Black Tower. The tower, while housing the gem, also serves as the place of punishment for citizens guilty of crimes too horrendous to allow for a clean death. They are marched in and left to powers unknown for the execution of their sentences. Needless to say, though by unexpected means, Duar manages to escape his imprisonment and makes for the Rose of Gaon, by way of the Queen’s bedchamber.
 |
 |
Cover by Yuko Shimizu
Hideyuki Kikuchi was born on September 25, 1949.
Kikuchi published his first novel, Demon City Shinjuku in 1982 and his novel Black Guard was adapted into the film Wicked City in 1987. In addition to writing horror novels, Kikuchi has also published several manga. In addition to the series listed above, he also created Vampire Hunter D.
In 2012 Kikuchi’s short story “Sankaimin” appeared under the title “Mountain People, Ocean People,” in the 2012 anthology The Future is Japanese, edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington.
Set in the far future, “Mountain People, Ocean People,” as the title suggests, shows a world in which humanity has divided into two groups, one living in the mountains, the other under the sea. Kikuchi’s main focus is on the mountain dwellers, who have developed the ability to fly, with hunters among them looking out for wind spiders and sky sharks. Among those is third-generation hunter Kanaan who is trying to surpass the reputations of his ancestors, although his father ultimately disappeared under a cloud of suspicion that Kanaan knows is unwarranted.