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Birthday Reviews: William F. Nolan’s “Starblood”

Birthday Reviews: William F. Nolan’s “Starblood”

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Cover by Ron Walotsky
Cover by Ron Walotsky

William F. Nolan was born on March 6, 1928. He is best known for his novel Logan’s Run, which was turned into an Academy Award winning (and Hugo nominated) movie, as well as a television series that ran for one season. Nolan also wrote three sequels to the original novel, the most recent of which, Logan’s Mission, appeared in 2017.

Nolan has received the Bram Stoker Award for his non-fiction book Nolan on Bradbury: Sixty Years of Writing about the Master of Science Fiction, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award. He has received a Living Legend Award from the International Horror Guild, a Grandmaster Award from the World Horror Convention, a Special Convention Award from the World Fantasy Awards, and in 2006 he was named an Author Emeritus by SFWA.

“Starblood” first appeared in the anthology Infinity Four, edited by Robert Hoskins in 1972. It was also picked up by Forrest J. Ackerman and Pat LoBrutto for Perry Rhodan #102: Spoor of the Ants. Nolan has also included the story in several of his own collections, including Alien Horizons, Wonderworlds, Things Beyond Midnight, Dark Universe Stories: 1951-2001, Nightworlds, and Wild Galaxy.

The majority of “Starblood” presents the lives of six individuals in six short chapters. In each case, the main character dies suddenly and violently, through assassination, accident, or murder. In the course of these vignettes, Nolan does not attempt to tie them together in any way. He does offer a few lines of dialogue at both the beginning and the end of the story which offers a frame that explains what is happening, although it is not entirely satisfying.

Bobby is an infant whose crying annoys his parents so much his mother drops him from an air car without remorse. Tris is a woman who joined a cult in which she was sexually assaulted; when the cult throws her out and won’t allow her back in, she begs them to kill her. Morgan is killed in an ambush at night while he is fleeing his pursuers. David is a child who gets hit by a random car. Bax is killed at dinner by his dining companion and Lynda’s father, a paid assassin, accepts a hit on his own daughter.

Nolan’s world is bleak and unsympathetic, although he does toss out some interesting ideas about the future, notably the bookstore David is brought to (although given the selection of books recommended to the eleven year old, it is no surprise that he doesn’t like books). The closing frame offers a small link for the different stories, but it does nothing to alleviate the darkness of those stories.

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Drawing Out What it Truly Means to be Human: The Best of Philip K. Dick

Drawing Out What it Truly Means to be Human: The Best of Philip K. Dick

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The Best of Philip K Dick-small The Best of Philip K Dick-back-small

The late Philip K. Dick (1928–1982), oftentimes lovingly called PKD, still fascinates many today. As evidence I point to the popularity of two current series on Amazon: The Man in High Castle, based upon Dick’s 1962 novel of the same name, and now Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, an anthology show based upon various PKD short stories. And of course we just had the recent movie Blade Runner 2049, the sequel to the 80s Ridley Scott classic Blade Runner, based upon Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). It doesn’t seem that PKD’s influence is going away anytime soon.

In this spirit I’m excited to discuss The Best of Philip K. Dick (1977), the ninth installment in Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction Series. Science fiction writer John Brunner (1934–1995) wrote the highly appreciative introduction and the cover sports a new artist for the series, Vincent Di Fate (1945–), whose art style fits very well with the earlier classic covers of Dean Ellis and Darrell Sweet. Since this volume returned to a living (at the time) author, the afterword was by PKD himself.

PKD has always had something of a cult following. He is often associated with everything from classic science fiction, to cyberpunk and realistic futurism, to the drug culture of the 60s and 70s (thanks to a famous Rolling Stone article in 1975), and even with religious mysticism. There are countless books about Dick’s life and work, plus a multitude of documentaries, many of which are available online.

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Birthday Reviews: Mike Resnick’s “The Evening Line”

Birthday Reviews: Mike Resnick’s “The Evening Line”

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Mash Up
Mash Up

Mike Resnick was born on March 5, 1942. He has won five Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, the Seiun Award, a Xatafi-Cyberdark Award, two Prix Ozones, a Mechanical Peach, and three Ignotus Awards. In 2012 ISFiC Press published Win Some, Lose Some, a collection of his 29 Hugo nominated stories. That same year, Resnick was the Guest of Honor at Chicon 2000, that year’s Worldcon. He was awarded a Skylark Award by NESFA in 1995.

Resnick has published numerous novels in his loose Birthright Universe, including Ivory, Santiago, and the Oracle trilogy. In both his novels and his short stories he makes use of characters who are larger than life and his writing is often influenced by the pulps, adventure stories, and westerns. His Kirinyaga cycle, made up of ten short stories, is one of the most nominated short story series in science fiction.

In addition to his own fiction, Resnick has served as the executive editor of Jim Baen’s Universe and as editor for Galaxy’s Edge magazine. Resnick has edited numerous anthologies and helped dozens of beginning authors with early sales and he has collaborated with authors ranging from Lezli Robyn to Jack McDevitt to Susan Shwartz to Nicholas A. DiChario. Many of his collaborations have been collected in With a Little Help from My Friends and With a Little More Help from My Friends.

The story “The Evening Line” was written for Gardner Dozois’s audio anthology Rip-Off!, which asked various authors to write a story which took the first line from a famous work of fiction. Resnick adapted “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must by in want of a wife,” from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The story was eventually reprinted in Mash Up, a retitling of the anthology when it saw print a couple years after the audio version. I would lay book that the story will eventually appear in a collection of all of Resnick’s Harry the Book stories, of which there are currently ten.

“The Evening Line” is a one of a series of stories Resnick has written about Harry the Book, a pastiche of Damon Runyon set in a world where magic is at play. In this particular story, Plug Malone has hit it big at the races and when word gets out about his good fortune, he finds himself facing a huge number of fortune-hunting women looking for a husband. The story, both stylistically and in its depiction of men and women, is very much a throwback to the period in which Runyon was writing his Broadway stories.

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Birthday Reviews: Patricia Kennealy-Morrison’s “The Last Voyage”

Birthday Reviews: Patricia Kennealy-Morrison’s “The Last Voyage”

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Cover by Greg Call
Cover by Greg Call

Patricia Kennealy-Morrison was born on March 4, 1946. Kennealy got her start as a music journalist, serving as the editor-in-chief of Jazz &Pop and becoming one of the first female rock critics. In 1970 she participated in a handfasting ceremony with Jim Morrison of The Doors, although the couple never filed paperwork with the state to register their marriage.

In the 1980s, Kennealy-Morrison began publishing an epic space opera series, The Keltiad, which followed a group of Celts who left the British islands around the year 450, although the books were set in the 35th century. The series was comprised of two trilogies, and a stand-alone novel, as well as the short story “The Last Voyage,” and Kennealy-Morrison has indicated she plans to write more in the milieu. When her publisher cancelled further books in the 1990s, she turned her attention to mysteries and eventually set up her own press.

“The Last Voyage” was the first short story Kennealy-Morrison published, although she had several novels in the Keltiad series by that point. It was included in her 2014 collection Tales of Spiral Castle: Stories of the Keltiad, published by her own Lizard Queen Press, and which included three original Keltiad stories.

“The Last Voyage” tells the story of Jamie Douglas, a Scottish knight in the service of King Robert the Bruce. Douglas is serving his king in Paris at the time that the destruction of the Knights Templar is about to occur and he works with the Knights to spirit hundreds of them away for a life in Scotland, far from the reach of the French king bent on their destruction. En route to Scotland, their fleet is intercepted by a spaceship carrying the descendants of Celts who fled earth centuries earlier who offer the Templars a new life among the stars. Many of them accept, although a vestige of the Templars, including Douglas, continue on to serve King Robert.

Kennealy-Morrison combines the plight of the Knights Templar with her existing series of novels, The Keltiad, which provides the background for her space-faring Celts. Set in 1312, the story is reminiscent of Poul Anderson’s earlier The High Crusade, set in 1345. Unfortunately, while the aliens in Anderson’s novel provide the impetus for the novel, the Kelts of Kennealy-Morrison’s story serve more as a deus ex machina. In addition, her prose tends towards the over-written and florid, reminiscent of a more Victorian style in both description and dialogue. Kennealy-Morrison presents an interesting secret history, but her link in to her series of novels doesn’t integrate well into the historical context she presents.

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Peplum Populist: The Colossus of Rhodes (1961)

Peplum Populist: The Colossus of Rhodes (1961)

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Colossus_Rhodes_1961_French_poster

The Colossus of Rhodes may be my personal favorite Italian sword-and-sandal (peplum) film. This one has everything: epic scope, gigantic ornate sets, devious espionage fun, bizarre gizmos, numerous brawls and sword fights, amphitheater challenges, secret passages, a sadistic torture chamber, a dungeon with lions, ceremonial dances, an evil temple, a femme fatale, an earthquake, a slave uprising, copious practical special effects, a gratuitous ape costume, and the insane super-weapon statue at its center. The only thing it doesn’t have is a muscleman hero. But it has the best possible substitute: one of the all-time great directors of world cinema, Sergio Leone. A guy with director muscles to rival Steve Reeves’s actual muscles.

Before you get too excited, I must explain that The Colossus of Rhodes (Il Colosso di Rhodi) is the seventh best of the seven movies with Leone as the credited director. However, the other six are A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, Duck, You Sucker!, and Once Upon a Time in America. No shame coming in seventh to that bunch. The Colossus of Rhodes isn’t a baroque masterpiece, but it’s a solid neo-classical success.

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Birthday Reviews: Arthur Machen’s “The Coming of the Terror”

Birthday Reviews: Arthur Machen’s “The Coming of the Terror”

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Cover by Wilfred Jones
Cover by Wilfred Jones

Arthur Machen was born Arthur Llewellyn Jones on March 3, 1863 and died on December 15, 1947.

Machen had a strong interest in the occult and published his first poem, “Eleusinia” when he was 18 years old. He struggled as a writer before seeing more success in the 1890s, including the publications of his story “The Great God Pan” in 1894. In the early days of World War I he published the short story “The Bowman” which described phantom bowman from Agincourt called upon to help the British Expeditionary Force at the Battle of Mons. The story entered into popular culture as an actual description of the battle and led to the folklore around the “Angels of Mons.”

Machen originally published “The Coming of the Terror” in The Century, an illustrated magazine published from 1881 to 1930, although it grew out of Scribner’s Monthly, which dated back to 1870. The story was part of his longer novel The Terror and has rarely been reprinted only its own, only seeing print in 2003 in the Chaosium collection of Machen’s story’s The White People and Other Stories and that same year in Douglas Anderson’s anthology Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy.

“The Coming of the Terror” feels a lot like one of the stories H.P. Lovecraft would begin publishing five years later, but with significant differences. Machen’s tale of mysterious deaths during the Great War slowly builds from reporting on the crash of an airman who hit a swarm of pigeons to the seemingly unrelated deaths and disappearances in a small village in Wales. The deaths lead to paranoia that the Germans have somehow managed to attack the English countryside undetected, either using a strange new weapon or by infiltrating the citizenry.

While Lovecraft cites Machen as one of his sources (and Machen mentions the original village of Dunwich in this story), “The Coming of the Terror” really isn’t Lovecraftian in nature. Machen doesn’t use excessively purple prose to describe the sinister events occurring around his Welsh village of Porth. Furthermore rather than being witnessed by a single individual, the effects are widespread. Everyone is aware that something is happening, and the fact that the newspapers refuse to report on it just make the conjectures that much more horrific. Machen allows events to build slowly, from a single incident to several, their relationship to each other only explicit because they are all taking place in the same story.

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Birthday Reviews: Ann Leckie’s “The Unknown God”

Birthday Reviews: Ann Leckie’s “The Unknown God”

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Cover by Randy Gallegos
Cover by Randy Gallegos

Ann Leckie was born on March 2, 1966. Her first novel Ancillary Justice was published in 2013 and not only opened her Imperial Radch series, but won the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke, British Fantasy, British SF, Seiun, and Kitschie Awards. The second book in the series, Ancillary Sword, also won the British SF Association Award. While Ancillary Justice won the Locus Poll for Best first novel, the other two books in the series won the Locus Poll for Best SF novel. Leckie also served as the editor for the magazine Gigantosaurus from 2010-2014.

“The Unknown God” appeared in the February 2010 issue of Realms of Fantasy, purchased by Shawna McCarthy. It is related to her God of Au series of stories and was reprinted in January-February 2017 issue of Uncanny Magazine.

Awolo is the God of Horses, living for the past year as a human being in “The Unknown God.” Having fallen in love with the human Saest,who spurned him, Awolo cursed her and left her for dead. Leaving the city, he decided to see how the other half lives, going so far as to live among a group of atheists for a while.

On his return to the city, Awolo discovers that Saest has survived the intervening year, although she is still bound by his curse. Joining up with the merchant Nes Imosa, who doesn’t fully realize Awolo is the god, not just named for him, they go to seek Saest and remove the curse.

Leckie’s story depicts an intriguing culture with a complex and unique understand of the gods who inhabit it. While she doesn’t fully delve into the divine structure of the world (which is also featured in her stories “The God of Au,” “Marsh Gods,” and “The Nalendar”), but clearly knows the background of her world, so while it feels like she isn’t revealing everything, it does not feel underdeveloped, but rather leaves the reader wanting more.

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Birthday Reviews: Wyman Guin’s “Trigger Tide”

Birthday Reviews: Wyman Guin’s “Trigger Tide”

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Cover by Ed Cartier
Cover by Ed Cartier

Wyman Guin was born on March 1, 1915 and died on February 19, 1989. Guin only published seven stories and one novel, The Standing Joy during his career. His most famous stories may have been “Beyond Bedlam” and “Volpla,” the latter of which was adapted for the radio show X Minus 1 in August 1957. Guin was declared the winner of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award in 2013.

Guin’s first story was “Trigger Tide.” When it was first published in Astounding in October 1950, edited by John W. Campbell Jr., it appeared under the pseudonym Norman Menasco, although Guin reverted to his own name for his second story, “Beyond Bedlam.”

The story was reprinted by Groff Conklin in Omnibus of Science Fiction and was included in his collection Living Way Out (a.k.a. Beyond Bedlam). It was again reprinted in The World Turned Upside Down, edited by Eric Flint, David Drake, and Jim Baen.

Guin’s story is about an agent on a distant planet who is trying to assassinate a fascist leader, a task assigned to earlier agents who have failed. When the story opens, he is lying, beaten, on a shelf of quartzcar near the beach and must try to get away from the shore before the tide comes in.

The setting is the most intriguing part of the story. The world is made up of archipelagos of quartzcar. The crystalline structure of the material means that any landmass above the water line is a series of shelves. In addition, the five moons orbiting the planet caused a wide variation of tides. Furthermore, the tides wreaked havoc with the piezoelectrical currents inherent in the quartz.

The impact of this strange situation is felt at the climax of the story, which doesn’t feel like a deus ex machina only because the story feels like it is a set up to exploit the strange parameters of the world.

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Birthday Reviews: Tim Powers’s “Through and Through”

Birthday Reviews: Tim Powers’s “Through and Through”

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Cover by Phil Parks
Cover by Phil Parks

While 2018 isn’t a leap year, that doesn’t stop us from celebrating authors with that very particular birthday.

Tim Powers was born on February 29, 1952. Other authors who were born on leap day include Patricia McKillip, Howard Tayler, and Sharon Webb. Powers has frequently collaborated with James P. Blaylock, occasionally using the joint pseudonym William Ashbless, which is not only a pseudonym, but a poet both authors have referred to in their works.

Powers has won the Philip K. Dick Award for his novels The Anubis Gates and Dinner at Deviant’s Palace. His novels Last Call and Declare have won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and he won the Collection award for The Bible Repairman and Other Stories. Anubis Gates also won the Prix Apollo and Geffen Award, Declare earned Powers an International Horror Guild Award, and The Stress of Her Regard won a Mythopoeic Award and Ignotus Award. A translation of the story “A Soul in a Bottle” won the Xatafi-Cyberdark Award. In 2014, LASFS recognized Powers with the Forry Award.

In 2003, Subterranean Press published an anthology by Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock called The Devils in the Details, which contained a story by each author and a collaborative effort. Powers contributed “Through and Through.” The story was included in his collection Strange Itineraries and again in Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers.

“Through and Through” tells the tale of a priest doing a stint in the Confessional shortly after a woman committed suicide in his church. He had received her confession, but was unable to give her absolution. A week after her funeral, she returns to receive the penance he refused her the first time.

In other hands, the priest might have suffered from a crisis of faith, however Powers priest is grounded in the secular world, while easily accepting that the woman’s ghost can be in the confession. At the same time, he is trying to balance the changes that have been introduced to the traditional priesthood and sacraments he embraces, and those the Church is currently promoting.

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Birthday Reviews: February Index

Birthday Reviews: February Index

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January index

At the one sixth mark in our journey through the year, here’s a look back at the birthday reviews that appeared at Black Gate in February.

February 1, Yevgeny Zamyatin: “The Cave”
February 2, Selina Rosen: “Food Quart”
February 3, Alex Bledsoe: “Shall We Gather ”
February 4, Neal Asher: “Owner Space”
February 5, Joseph H. Delaney: “Survival Course”
February 6, Eric Flint: “Portraits”
February 7, Karen Joy Fowler: “Always”
February 8, Mary Robinette Kowal: “Just Right”

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