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Birthday Reviews: Reginald Bretnor’s “Cat”

Birthday Reviews: Reginald Bretnor’s “Cat”

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Cover by Ed Emshwiller
Cover by Ed Emshwiller

Reginald Bretnor was born Alfred Reginald Kahn on July 30, 1911 and died on July 22, 1992.

Bretnor’s short story “Earthwoman” was nominated for the Nebula Award in 1968 and his story “The Gnurrs Come from the Voodvork Out” was nominated for a Retro Hugo in 2001. His non-fiction book Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future was nominated for a Retro Hugo in 2004. Bretnor may be best remembered for his series of short shaggy dog stories about Ferdinand Feghoot and published under the pseudonym Grendal Briarton, an anagram of Reginald Bretnor.

“Cat” was originally published in the April 1953 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas. It was translated into French as “Langue de chat” and published in 9th issue of Fiction in August 1954. Annette McComas included it in her 1982 anthology The Eureka Years and it was the first story in the Bretnor collection The Timeless Tales of Reginald Bretnor, edited by Fred Flaxman in 1997. The story also appeared in The Second Cat Megapack: Frisky Feline Tales, Old and New, edited by Robert Reginald and Mary Wickizer Burgess.

Reginald Bretnor’s title “Cat” refers less to the animal and more to the language spoken by those animals, which Dr. Emerson Smithby and his wife, Cynthia, not only claim to have learned, but also claim they can translate and teach. Their claims wreak havoc for Professor Christopher Flewkes, the head of the language department at Bogwood College, who must try to maintain the college’s reputation amidst Smithby’s spectacular claims and the other professors’ refusal to work in the same department as a man they view as a charlatan.

While “Cat” may not be as humorous as the Papa Schimmelhorn stories of the Feghoots for which Bretnor is best known, it does have its moments of humor as Flewkes and one of the professors in his department, Witherspoon, try to either expose Smithby or place him into compromising positions with the aid of a private investigator. In the end, their attempts to subvert Smithby and his wife prove to be their own undoing.

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Birthday Reviews: Forrest Aguirre’s “Matriarch”

Birthday Reviews: Forrest Aguirre’s “Matriarch”

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Cover by Lara Wells
Cover by Lara Wells

Forrest Aguirre was born on July 29, 1969.

Aguirre’s career began around the turn of the millennium with several short stories appearing in various magazines and several Wheatland Press projects. He co-edited Leviathan, Volume Three with Jeff VanderMeer, which earned them a nomination for the Philip K. Dick Award and won them a World Fantasy Award. He also edited Leviathan 4: Cities and Polyphony 7, the latter with Deborah Layne.

Aguirre wrote “Matriarch” for inclusion in the David Moles and Jay Lake edited All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories. The next year, Aguirre included the story in his collection Fugue XXIX.

“Matriarch” is a very short story, almost a vignette, which does not provide any real context for the story itself. It is set aboard a zeppelin which appears to have a crew of three: the titular pilot and her two crewmembers, LeFevre and LeBlanc. More important than setting or context is the story’s imagery. Aguirre describes the zeppelin in short terms, but they are evocative. The airship has clearly recently been in a battle and the losing forces, officials from the city below it, are dangling from ropes lowered from the zeppelin, skirting the heads of children in the city who have turned cannibal.

Even in their moment of triumph and riding above the ravenous throngs, the Matriarch and her crew don’t feel completely safe. LeFevre finds himself falling into the crowd below the zeppelin, and is killed and stripped clean by the children, almost as if he had fallen into a river swarming with piranhas. Losing LeFevre and the dangling officials to the cannibals allows the zeppelin to flee the scene of its victory and the carnage below, however, LeBlanc misreads the situation, much to his dismay.

There is little story and little setting in “Matriarch,” but Aguirre is fully able to describe the scenes through which the Matriarch zeppelin is flying. The imagery is almost cinematic in nature even if he doesn’t give too many specifics on what his characters, the city, or the airship look like. When he does deploy his expressive powers, Aguirre gets fully value.

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Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle (2018) — Good Science Fiction, Not Great Godzilla

Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle (2018) — Good Science Fiction, Not Great Godzilla

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Godzilla-City-Edge-Battle-Roadshow-PosterLast week was a significant one for the Big G. The first trailer for 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters was unveiled at San Diego Comi-Con, displaying staggering scope and beauty set to the improbably perfect sound of Claude Debussy’s “Clair de lune.” Meanwhile, as fans salivated in anticipation of the next installment in the US Godzilla series after 2014’s Godzilla, the next Japanese Godzilla film made a quiet debut in North America via Netflix — Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle (Gojira: Kessen Kido Zoshoku Toshi). It’s also a second installment: part two of a trilogy of animated Godzilla films from Toho Animation and Polygon Pictures that started with Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters.

I was roughly satisfied with Planet of the Monsters. It explored the theme of Godzilla as a deity and introduced intriguing science-fiction concepts, but it never found a solid adventure throughline for its apocalyptic Earth setting and left the potential of an animated Godzilla largely unrealized. City on the Edge of Battle makes forward strides as it deepens its SF backstory, now freed from having to go through the set-up that was necessary in the first movie. But as a Godzilla film, it still doesn’t work, and this makes me wonder exactly who the movie is targeted at. Godzilla fans? Anime fans? Science-fiction fans not-otherwise-specified? The last group may be the most satisfied, but I predict general dissatisfaction all around.

For those who came in late (and there’s no way to keep up with this movie unless you’ve seen Planet of the Monsters), here’s how events stood at the conclusion of Part One:

The remnants of the human race, in exile among the stars after Godzilla drove them off the Earth, choose to return to their homeworld and attempt to reclaim it from the monster. Although twenty years have passed on the refugee spaceship the Aratrum, over twenty-two thousand years have passed on Earth. Over the millennia, Godzilla’s biology has radically altered the ecosystem into a bizarre and hostile environment. With the assistance of two humanoid alien races, the mystical Exif and the technological Bilusaludo, the humans mount an offensive to destroy Godzilla. The plan of young Captain Haruo Sakaki succeeds — then immediately fails when it turns out the monster they killed (Godzilla Filius) was only an offspring of the original Godzilla that ravaged the planet (Godzilla Asu, “Godzilla Earth”). The true Godzilla emerges, grown in size and strength over thousands of years to unimaginable power. So was the fight all for nothing?

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Birthday Reviews: Jayge Carr’s “The Lady or the Tiger”

Birthday Reviews: Jayge Carr’s “The Lady or the Tiger”

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Cover by Jael
Cover by Jael

Jayge Carr was born Margery Ruth Morgenstern Krueger on July 28, 1940 and died on December 20, 2006.

In addition to her writing career, Carr worked as a nuclear physicist for NASA. Following her death from cancer, her remains were launched into orbit by Celestis.

“The Lady or the Tiger” was published by Charles C. Ryan in the Fall 1993 issue of Aboriginal Science Fiction after the magazine switched formats from a tabloid to a quarto format (standard magazine). The story has not been reprinted.

A missed stop of a city bus puts Alia in danger of being gang raped by a bunch of teenagers. When one of the teenagers momentarily objects, she is rescued by the timely arrival of the police, who take her savior into custody even as the other boys flee. In turn, Alia takes the boy under her wing and applies the Pygmalion treatment to him. However, as is quickly revealed, Alia is not what she appears and the situation is much more complex than anyone could guess.

All of Alia’s actions regarding Benny, as well as her responses to Rod O’Rourke, the police officer who first helped her and later wooed her, seem to be governed by a pair of aliens who are testing the humans. It eventually becomes evident that Alia is one of the aliens, trying to figure out if humans can subvert their own violent tendencies.

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Birthday Reviews: Gary Gygax’s “At Midnight Blackcat Comes”

Birthday Reviews: Gary Gygax’s “At Midnight Blackcat Comes”

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Cover by Dennis Kauth
Cover by Dennis Kauth

Gary Gygax was born Ernest Gary Gygax on July 28, 1938. He died on March 4, 2008. Although Gygax tried his hand writing fiction, he was best known as one of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons.

Gygax was inducted into the Origins Award Hall of Fame in 1980. In addition to Dungeons and Dragons (and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons) and various modules and accessories, Gygax also had a hand in creating the role playing games Boot Hill, Cyborg Commando, Dangerous Journeys, and Lejendary Adventure.

Gygax wrote “At Moonset Blackcat Comes” as an introduction to the character Gord the Rogue, about whom he had already written the novel Saga of the Old City, which would be published later. The story appeared first in the 100th issue of Dragon, edited by Kim Mohan. Accompanying the story were the rules to the game Dragonchess, described in the story. Although Gygax published a series of five Gord the Rogue novels, plus the short story collection Night Arrant, “At Moonset Blackcat Comes” was not included in the collection and has not been reprinted elsewhere.

The story introduces the main character and his barbarian companion while also trying to give the reader a feel for the way the City of Greyhawk, alluded to in many of Gygax’s AD&D articles and modules, is set up. Rather than exploring the city, however, Gygax quickly separates Gord from his companion and the city, setting the action, such as it is, in a sporting house, with Chert the barbarian going off to find female companionship while Gord settles in with Rexfelis to learn to play a chess alternative.

While Gygax is clearly trying to make Gord a likable character who is extremely competent and sure of himself, he comes across as arrogant, placing his own amusement and desires above those, like Chert, with whom he has surrounded himself. Although Gord is on guard against being taken in the game of Dragonchess, it is clear that Rexfelis had been playing Gord throughout the evening with the eventual end of using Gord to rob Rigello the arch-mage, a task Gord readily accepts.

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Birthday Reviews: Lawrence Watt-Evans’s “The Man for the Job”

Birthday Reviews: Lawrence Watt-Evans’s “The Man for the Job”

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Cover by Michael Whelan
Cover by Michael Whelan

Lawrence Watt-Evans was born on July 26, 1954.

Watt-Evans’s short story “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers” was nominated for the Nebula and Hugo Awards in 1988 and won the Hugo Award. Watt-Evans was nominated for a second Hugo Award for best semi-prozine, as the co-editor, along with William Sanders, of Helix SF in 2008. Watt-Evans has published under the names Nathan Archer and Walter Vance Awsten. He has collaborated with Brenda Clough, Kurt Busiek, Christina Briley, Julie Evans, Esther Friesner, and Carl Parlagreco, and Dean Wesley Smith & Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

“The Man for the Job” was published in the December 2000 issue of Realms of Fantasy, edited by Shawna McCarthy. The story has not been reprinted has also appeared in The Lawrence Watt-Evans Fantasy MegaPack.

Watt-Evans takes on several fantasy standard tropes in “The Man for the Job.” The story opens with five siblings meeting with a wizard to get help in ridding themselves of an evil dragon. The group includes four brothers and their sister, who is insistent that they include her since her livelihood is at stake as well as theirs. The wizard, Gallopius, talks about magic items with them, noting that in days of yore, wizards hid magic items in strange, exotic, and stupid places where the wizards wouldn’t be able to retrieve them when needed. While Gallopius can lay hands on all his own enchanted items, they will need to complete a quest to find the Helmet of Balanced Justice to defeat the dragon.

The quest also subverts the typical quest story. The helmet is located relatively near to Gallopius’s home, and was hidden three hundred years earlier, protected by three guardians. Although Gallipius is able to tell them the nature of the guardians, they are not ready for the state they are in. Watt-Evans takes the idea of a centuries old protection to its logical conclusion, as all three guardians have failed to withstand the ravages of time and they manage to retrieve the helmet with some ease.

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Birthday Reviews: Brian M. Stableford’s “The Growth of the House of Usher”

Birthday Reviews: Brian M. Stableford’s “The Growth of the House of Usher”

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Cover by Pete Lyon
Cover by Pete Lyon

Brian M. Stableford was born on July 25, 1948.

Stableford received the British SF Association Award for his short story “The House of Mourning.” His anthology Tales of the Wandering Jew won the Readercon Award for Best Anthology and his novel The Empire of Fear won the Lord Ruthven Award. He has also won several scholarship awards, including the Eaton Award for his book Scientific Romance in Britain: 1890-1950, the Pilgrim Lifetime Achievement Award from the Science Fiction Research Associastion, the IAFA Distinguished Scholarship Award, and the SF&F Translation Award. Stableford has published under his own name as well as the pseudonyms Francis Amery and Brian Craig.

“The Growth of the House of Usher,” the first of Stableford’s loosely connected tales of the Biotech Revolution, first appeared in the Summer 1988 issue of Interzone, issue #24, edited by Simon Ounsley and David Pringle. Gardner Dozois recognized it in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection the following year. It was also reprinted in David Memmott’s fanzine Ice River, issue 4 in June of 1989. John Clute, Pringle, and Ounsley selected the story for Interzone: The 4th Anthology. Stableford included it in two of his collections of stories about the Biotech Revolution with the similar titles Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution and Sexual Chemistry and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution.

Stableford acknowledges early in the story that the title of “The Growth of the House of Usher” is a call back to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In Stableford’s story, set in the 23rd century, Rowland Usher has secluded himself away from his fellow man, living in a massive house of his own design in the delta of the Orinoco River in Venezuela. He has summed an own college friend to see the house and to let him know that Usher has chosen his friend to be his executor, for Usher suffers, as his father and sister suffered before him, from a deadly disease.

Despite being a science fiction story, focusing on using biotech to create buildings and improving biotech for even greater things, the story clearly belongs to the Gothic tradition, although while a lot of Gothic fiction is wary of technology (see Frankenstein), Stableford’s story embraces the possibilities. This is most obvious in the description of the massive home Usher has built, made of replicating biomatter which will continue to grow and improve long after he, and his friend, are dead. At the same time, even if technology and science can’t save Usher’s life, he still views it favorably, seeing the sacrifice of his own life to the disease as a means of helping science learn what ravaged his family in the hopes of preventing it in the future should it reappear.

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A Modern Masterpiece: The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

A Modern Masterpiece: The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

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The-Hazel-Wood-Melissa Albert-smallI usually need to read at least a third of a book before deciding to review it for Black Gate. While I always read the books I review all the way to the end, sometimes it takes that long to decide. But when I picked up Melissa Albert’s The Hazel Wood, I suspected I’d review it after only reading the first two paragraphs. I was sure of it once I’d hit page three.

That’s got to be some kind of record.

Something’s strange about our protagonist, Alice Crewe. From a young age, she’s always been on the move. Her most dominant memory is the view of the blue sky out the sunroof. But according to her mother, their car doesn’t have one.

When she was three, Alice was abducted by a kind stranger who drove off with her in a blue Buick. Even though her mother swears she’s never seen the man before, we wonder if perhaps six-year-old Alice could be right, and he’s actually her father.

Throughout Alice’s childhood, dangerous people and peculiar occurrences dog Alice and her mother like persistent bad luck, so they lead a semi-nomadic existence, uprooting themselves whenever something uncanny gets too close. Until one day, when Alice’s mother receives a letter informing her of her mother’s death. “This isn’t… forgive me, but this isn’t a bad thing. It’s not,” she insists. “It means we’re free.”

Alice’s grandmother’s death means that, for once, they can stop moving. The bad luck’s gone. When their home is subsequently broken into, it’s not a resurgence of the curse. It’s just New York City being, you know, New York City.

Or so teenage Alice thinks, until the day she’s working at a coffee shop and realizes that one of her customers is the man who kidnapped her when she was six. He’s sitting at a table reading Tales from the Hinterland, the collection of dark fairy tales written by Alice’s grandmother that’s so rare, Alice has never been able to read it. When he sees that she’s noticed him, he exits in a hurry, taking the book with him but leaving behind a bone, a feather, and a red plastic comb. For the first time, Alice wonders whether her grandmother’s disturbing fairy tales might not be fiction.

Maybe they’re real.

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Birthday Reviews: John D. MacDonald’s “Ring Around the Redhead”

Birthday Reviews: John D. MacDonald’s “Ring Around the Redhead”

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BG_MacDonaldOtherWorldsEvery so often, I prove that the Black Gate firewall needs some serious tightening up by jumping in and putting up a post where I don’t belong (many readers and fellow bloggers believe that would be the entirety of the Black Gate website…). So, if you’re reading this, the crack web monitoring team hasn’t seen it yet. Don’t tell Steven Silver. He might gnaw through the restraining chain around his ankle and crawl over to my desk in the cellar…basement…journalist’s suite to thrash me.

John Dann MacDonald, my favorite author and one of the best writers of the twentieth century – in any genre – was born on July 24th, 1916. MacDonald, Harvard MBA and a lieutenant colonel in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, was thirty years old when he began writing for the pulps in 1946. Through hard work and talent, MacDonald quickly became successful, selling to the mystery and sports magazines.

He graduated to the slicks more quickly than most pulpsters and he began writing paperback novels in 1950, mostly for Fawcett Gold Medal and Dell. And in 1960 he created his famous non-private eye, Travis McGee, in The Deep Blue Goodbye. MacDonald wrote over 400 short stories and five dozen novels.

It’s less well-remembered that in the late forties and early fifties, MacDonald wrote a great deal of science fiction: over fifty short stories and two novels. He tired of the genre and essentially quit cold turkey in 1952, writing only seven more stories and one novel (The Girl, The Gold Watch & Everything, which was made into a movie with Robert Hays and Pam Dawber) in the final thirty-four years of his life. He wrote that he tired of science fiction and simply quit writing it.

“Ring Around the Redhead” appeared in the November, 1948 issue of Startling Stories (His “Shenadun” had been in the September issue). It was anthologized in 1953 and again in 1967. I read it in Other Times, Other Worlds, a collection consisting entirely of science fiction stories by MacDonald.

Bill Maloney, an inventor, is on trial for murdering his next door neighbor. There’s no body, just some brain and hair bits. Anita Hempflet, the classic nosy neighbor (you know, the kind that says “I don’t mind anybody’s business but my own” and then proceeds to gossip like it’s an Olympic event) weighs in with her nose in the air, saying that Bill has been shacked up (remember: it’s 1948) with a pretty redhead who seems to be deaf and was wearing some odd, metallic clothing when she appeared.

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Next Year in Khatovar: She Is the Darkness by Glen Cook Part 1

Next Year in Khatovar: She Is the Darkness by Glen Cook Part 1

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oie_2353716i3KOHmsdA skinny, mangy mongrel raced past and on the dead run clamped jaws on a startled crow. He got a wing.

All the crows in the world descended on him before he could enjoy his dinner.

“A parable,” One-Eye said. “Observe! Black crows. Black dog. The eternal struggle.”

“Black philosopher,” Croaker grumbled.

“Black Company.”

One-Eye and Croaker from She Is the Darkness

It’s summer, I’m busy living a summer life. As Glen Cook books go, She Is the Darkness (1997) is a long one. Um, something, something, something. All that’s to say I’m breaking my review into two parts. It’s not what I’d normally do, but I don’t want to lose the momentum of reading the books back to back. Remember: beyond here lie spoilers.

At the end of the previous book, Bleak Seasons, the Black Company under the restored leadership of Croaker, aka the Old Man, aka the Captain, was girding its loins for the final march on the last stronghold of Longshadow, the last Shadowmaster.

Overlook is pretty much Glen Cook’s version of Barad-dûr. Its walls rise to a hundred feet, and are covered in protective spells. Inside lurk untold numbers of soldiers backed by the terrible sorcery of the erstwhile Taken, Howler, and Longshadow himself.

In the field, ex-Black Company chief-of-staff Mogaba leads Longshadow’s last remaining army. Aided by another defector, Blade, Mogaba cannot imagine himself being beaten, and lies in wait for the Black Company and the soldiers of Taglios to attempt to force the pass over the Dhanda Presh Mountains.

Oh, and the wife of new Black Company Annalist Murgen was murdered by the Deceivers. During an assassination attempt on Croaker in the Palace of Taglios, a group of killers found their way into the living quarters of Murgen’s family and left his wife Sahra and her son dead. While not a completely broken man, Murgen is allowing himself to become addicted to traveling through time and space on the spirit of the comatose wizard, Smoke. Officially, Murgen’s doing this to spy on Longshadow and other things important to the health and welfare of the Black Company, but really it’s to avoid the depression brought on by the killing of Sahra. It continues to be a poorly explained and clunky device.

The death of Sahra is also not as simple as it seems. There’s a terrible secret surrounding it, and even though his late wife’s family, including the thoroughly kickass Uncle Doj, know what happened, Murgen doesn’t uncover it for many months. In a series flush with emotionally raw events, what really happened the night of Sahra’s death is one of the hardest in the whole series.

The entire first half of She Is the Darkness concerns the movement of Croaker’s forces towards the showdown with Mogaba’s and Blade’s. Meanwhile Murgen, flying on the wings of Smoke’s psyche, spies for his commander and fills in all the gaps for the reader, giving us an inside look at the doings of the Company’s enemies. There’s no getting around it, much of the first half of the book’s a slog. It might reflect some sort of logistical and strategic masterpiece if it occurred in real life, but on the page it moves like molasses on a winter day. Nonetheless, the book isn’t a disaster, just frustrating.

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