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Action Star of Hollywood’s Golden Age: Errol Flynn: The Life and Career, by Thomas McNulty

Action Star of Hollywood’s Golden Age: Errol Flynn: The Life and Career, by Thomas McNulty

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The Life and Career of Errol Flynn-smallErrol Flynn: The Life and Career
By Thomas McNulty
McFarland Publishing (381 pages, $29.95 in trade paperback/$15.99 digital, April 8, 2004)

Errol Flynn never made a fantasy film during his long career, although he portrayed a number of legendary and historical characters, such as William Tell, and the great pugilist, “Gentleman” Jim Corbett.  But undoubtedly his most famous role was the lead in 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, one of the classic and most famous heroes in legend, myth, and perhaps in history, too.

Flynn  first sailed to stardom in 1935 with the success of Captain Blood, which was followed by the 1936 version of The Charge of the Light Brigade. He began 1940 with The Sea Hawk, and in 1941 he portrayed George Armstrong Custer in They Died with Their Boots on. While these films cemented the cinematic persona of Flynn as the dashing, humorous, cheeky action hero, he made three war films in which he played straight, and against type, and showed off his acting skills: The Dawn Patrol in 1938, Edge of Darkness in 1943, and Operation Burma, in 1945, these last two based on real-life events. Flynn had great respect for the military and the war effort, and he played the leads in these three films with a grim sincerity that proved he could do more than wield a sword and shoot a longbow.

While Douglas Fairbanks, Senior was the first action star of the silent film era, Flynn was, in my opinion, the first action hero of the “talking motion picture.” You might think that Douglas Fairbanks, Junior would have inherited the crown from his father, but it was Flynn who won the throne.

Flynn also published two novels in his lifetime: Beam Ends, in 1937 — a travel and adventure novel; and Showdown, a 1946 romantic adventure. His also wrote his autobiography in 1959, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, which has never been out of print. Flynn not only inspired a genre and many other actors, he also inspired me. He appears (with both Fairbanks Senior and Junior) in my novella, The Pirates of Penance, which appeared in the 2017  Heroes in Hell anthology Pirates in Hell. (There’s also a lot of Flynn to be found in my and Dave Smith’s pirate fantasy, Waters of Darkness.)

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Birthday Reviews: Joan D. Vinge’s “Eyes of Amber”

Birthday Reviews: Joan D. Vinge’s “Eyes of Amber”

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Cover by John Schoenherr
Cover by John Schoenherr

Joan D. Vinge was born on April 2, 1948.

Vinge was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1976. She won a Hugo Award in 1978 for her novelette “Eyes of Amber” and a second Hugo in 1981 for the novel The Snow Queen, which was also nominated for a Nebula Award, Ditmar Award, and the coveted Balrog Award. The sequel to The Snow Queen, The Summer Queen, was also nominated for the Hugo Award.

“Eyes of Amber” originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact’s June 1977 issue, edited by Stanley Schmidt. The next year,  not only did Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha include the story in The 1978 Annual World’s Best SF, but Pamela Sargent selected it for her The New Women of Wonder anthology.  Vinge named her 1979 collection Eyes of Amber and Other Stories. In 1982, Schmidt reprinted the story in Analog Anthology #2: Readers’ Choice. It appeared in The Hugo Winners: Volume 4, edited by Isaac Asimov who also included it in the anthology The Dark Void. Over the years, the story has been translated into Dutch (twice), French, German (twice), Italian (twice), Hungarian, and Polish.

The opening of “Eyes of Amber” has a distinct fantasy feel, describing an apparently feudal society in which T’uupieh has been dispossessed of her estate. Turned assassin, he is offered a chance of some level of vengeance if she will kill the current estate owner and his family, which includes her sister. As soon as Vinge sets this situation up, however, she subverts the reader’s expectations by revealing that T’uupieh’s society is on Saturn’s moon Titan and she is being watched remotely by humans on Earth who are studying her society and language.

The primary linguist onEearth is musician turned scientist Shannon Wyler, whose attempts to make his own life away from the expectations of his scientist parents have only been partially successful. Wyler’s musical background helps him in his attempts to communicate with the race through a device which T’uupieh carries and believes to be a demon who has chosen her.

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Modular: Explore Starfinder’s Pact Worlds

Modular: Explore Starfinder’s Pact Worlds

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PactWorldsThe Starfinder RPG allows for literally a universe full of original settings, giving Gamemasters the opportunity to create their own worlds and societies as the basis for their games. For those who like working with a framework of existing source material, though, the Starfinder development team has done a great job of presenting exactly the sort of rich, diverse system of planets, races, and societies that one could hope to find: the Pact Worlds.

Starfinder is set in the distant future of their Pathfinder RPG fantasy setting, after the dominance of magic and superstition has given way to science and technology (and, of course, technomagic). The planet of Golarion, the center of the Pathfinder fantasy setting, has vanished. In its place rests the massive Absalom Station, surrounded by the remaining planets of its solar system. No one knows what happened to Golarion or who built Absalom Station, due to a break in history known as the Gap.

The planets of the system have joined together with Absalom Station to form the Pact Worlds, a loose defensive alliance formed against external threats. These fourteen locations (not all are planets, as they include the Sun and an asteroid belt) get a couple of half-pages apiece in the Starfinder Core Rulebook, but the newly-released Starfinder Pact Worlds sourcebook (Amazon, Paizo) fleshes them out and provides a variety of related starship and player options for Starfinder characters. Both players and Gamemasters will find much to love about this newest installment in unfolding universe of Starfinder.

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Birthday Reviews: March Index

Birthday Reviews: March Index

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January index
February index

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

March 1, Wyman Guin: “Trigger Tide”
March 2, Ann Leckie: “The Unknown God”
March 3, Arthur Machen: “The Coming of the Terror ”
March 4, Patricia Kennealy-Morrison: “The Last Voyage”
March 5, Mike Resnick: “The Evening Line”
March 6, William F. Nolan: “Starblood”
March 7, Paul Preuss: “Rhea’s Time”
March 8, No Birthday Review published.
March 9, Pat Murphy: “On a Hot Summer Night in a Place Far Away”
March 10, Theodore Cogswell: “The Wall Around the World”
March 11, F.M. Busby: “Tundra Moss”
March 12, Harry Harrison: “The Mothballed Spaceship”

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Birthday Reviews: Samuel R. Delany’s “High Weir”

Birthday Reviews: Samuel R. Delany’s “High Weir”

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Cover by Douglas Chaffee
Cover by Douglas Chaffee

Samuel R. Delany was born on April 1, 1942.

Delany won back-to-back Nebula Awards for Best Novel for Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection. The second year also saw him winning a Nebula for Best Short Story for “Aye, and Gomorrah.” In 1970, his novelette “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award and he won a second Hugo for The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965.

His novel Dhalgren received a Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame Award and he received a Lambda Lifetime Achievement Award and a Pilgrim Award. Delany was the Guest of Honor at Intersection, the 1995 Worldcon. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002, received the Eaton Award in 2010, and in 2014 was named a SFWA Grand Master.

“High Weir” was first published in If by Frederik Pohl in the October 1968 issue. Delany included it in his collection Driftglass and Robert Hoskins reprinted it in the anthology Wondermakers 2. Brian Attebery and Ursula K. Le Guin selected the story for the collection The Norton Book of Science Fiction: American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 and Ellen Datlow published it on Sci Fiction on May 7, 2003. Delany included it in his 2013 collection Aye, and Gomorrah. The story was translated into French in 1970 for inclusion in Galaxie #76 and into German in 1982 when Delany’s Driftglass was published as Treibglas.

“High Weir” features a team of scientists and academics exploring a dead Mars and a ruin that indicates a high level of ancient Martian civilization. The story is told from Rimkin’s point of view. As the team linguist, there is little for him to do since the Martians did not appear to have any sort of written language. Furthermore, Rimkin exhibits signs that would now be recognized as autistic. He is a brilliant linguist, but his interpersonal skills are completely lacking to the point where he can’t identify his teammates when they are in their space suits, nor can he distinguish between their voices on the radio. Part of the team, he is entirely separate from it.

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Godzilla Acid Trips Thru Tokyo: Godzilla ‘77, a.k.a. Cozzilla

Godzilla Acid Trips Thru Tokyo: Godzilla ‘77, a.k.a. Cozzilla

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Do you remember the time Godzilla dropped the brown acid while watching Mothra’s colored wings, and then Raymond Burr joined him and they tipped back a few cases of wine from Burr’s personal vineyards, while Burr told the plot of Perry Mason episodes backwards, where Mason would undo a court decision, Paul Drake would put evidence back in place, and at the climax a dead body would return to life?

None of this actually happened — but something close to it did. It involves the Italian film industry (doesn’t it always?) and the director of Starcrash and the Lou Ferrigno Hercules movies. It’s called Godzilla il re dei mostri (“Godzilla the King of Monsters”), a.k.a. Cozzilla after its creator, Luigi Cozzi — and it’s one of the strangest and least known chapters in Godzilla history. Not as much an acid trip as Godzilla vs. Hedorah, but in that ballpark.

It starts with the 1976 King Kong. The Dino De Laurentiis remake of the ‘33 giant monster classic may not be much good (I’ll give composer John Barry a hand for his score, and I like Jeff Bridges’s beard), but it took in such a big overseas haul that it triggered a mini-monster boom in Europe and Asia. We can thank its success in Japan for getting the momentum going to restart the Godzilla series, resulting in The Return of Godzilla in 1984 and the better Heisei movies that followed.

But King Kong ‘76 also shocked into life an Italian take on Godzilla that most people are unaware exists. Godzilla il re dei mostri isn’t exactly a “new” film. It’s an Italian colorization and re-edit of the 1956 U.S. reshoot and re-edit of the 1954 Japanese Godzilla, only now with tie-dye colors, a mishmash of stock footage, and Tangerine Dream-esque electronic music. Because that’s what those two earlier versions of Godzilla were missing.

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Birthday Reviews: Alaya Dawn Johnson’s “Far and Deep”

Birthday Reviews: Alaya Dawn Johnson’s “Far and Deep”

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Cover by Adam Tredowski
Cover by Adam Tredowski

Alaya Dawn Johnson was born on March 31, 1982. She began publishing in 2005 with her story “Shard of Glass.” Her first novel, Racing the Dark, appeared in 2007. She was a Guest of Honor at Wiscon in 2015 and the convention published the guest of honor book, Metamorphosis, containing works and interviews with Johnson and her co-guest of honor Kim Stanley Robinson.

In 2015 Johnson won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette for “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i” and the same evening won the Andre Norton Award for Best Young Adult Novel for Love Is the Drug. The year before, she also had nominated work in each of those categories. Johnson’s fiction has been nominated for the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Carl Brandon Award.

“Far & Deep” was published in the March-April 2009 issue of Interzone, edited by Andy Cox, Andy Hedgecock, and David Mathew. It has not been reprinted.

The story is set on an unnamed Polynesian island and opens with Leilani discovering that her mother, Pineki, has been murdered. In her mourning, Leilani approaches the Council of Elders, of which her mother was a member, and is told that she will be denied a traditional funeral because of unspecified crimes she had committed.

It is clear that Pineki was not well liked on the island, although she didn’t care. Leilani must not only come to terms with her mother’s death, but also the way the other islanders perceived Pineki. In the few thousand words Johnson uses to tell the story, she manages to briefly tackle the questions of people who commit taboo behavior in a small community, the sense of filial love and duty, and the need for individuality in a society which demands at least of modicum of conformity. Despite Pineki’s position on the Council, she was seen as an outsider by the Council, who viewed her murder as the opportunity to get rid of a problem, rather than a crime that should be explored and punished. Leilani, who lost her parent, challenges the Council, an act worthy of her mother.

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Birthday Reviews: Chad Oliver’s “Transformer”

Birthday Reviews: Chad Oliver’s “Transformer”

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Cover by Chesley Bonestell
Cover by Chesley Bonestell

Chad Oliver was born on March 30, 1928 and died on August 10, 1993. He briefly became famous in 2000 when, trying to explain the concept of hanging chads in the aftermath of that year’s Presidential election, some newspapers discovered the existence of a science fiction author named Chad.

Oliver’s writing career began with the publication of the short story “The Land of Lost Content” in the November 1950 issue of Super Science Stories. He published short fiction through his career, with his final story published in 1991. During that time, he also published six novels and collaborated occasionally with Charles Beaumont and Garvin Berry. His 1984 story “Ghost Town” was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story.

Oliver published “Transformer” in the November 1954 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher. Oliver included it in his collection Another Kind the next year and it was also translated into French to be run in Fiction that year. William F. Nolan included it in the anthology Man Against Tomorrow and Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles Waugh chose it for The Great SF Stories #16 (1954). It appears in the second NESFA Press collection of Oliver’s works, Far from This Earth and Other Stories and was a featured reprint in the June 1, 2005 issue of Sci Fiction. The story has also been translated into German twice and into Hungarian.

“Transformer” is a forerunner to Toy Story, published forty years before the Pixar film was released. Oliver tells the story from the point of view of a woman who lives in the small village of ELM POINT, a town on the table of a model railroad owned by Willy Roberts. Unfortunately for her, Willy is more Sid Phillips than Andy Davis. Willy isn’t particularly abusive, he’s just a young boy who sometimes gets a little wild with his toys and is beginning to lose interest in his toy railroad, none of which is good from the point of view of those toys.

Unfortunately for Willy, his toys are more proactive that Sid’s toys were in Toy Story and they plan to murder him, using the electric train as their weapon of choice. The story is told in a matter of fact way, the contemplation of murder not a horrific crime, but merely a way of ending the unpleasant life they live, perhaps due to the casualness with which Willy kills the toys figures on the table without any regard for the lives he knows nothing about. Willy doesn’t exist when he’s not in the room, just as the townspeople’s lives wind down when the current is off.

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Birthday Reviews: Elizabeth Hand’s “Calypso in Berlin”

Birthday Reviews: Elizabeth Hand’s “Calypso in Berlin”

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Cover by B. A. Bosaiya
Cover by B. A. Bosaiya

Elizabeth Hand was born on March 29, 1957.

She won the World fantasy Award and the Nebula Award for her novella “Last Summer at Mars Hill.” She has won an additional Nebula for her short story “Echo” and three more World Fantasy Awards for her novellas Ilyria and The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, which was also a Hugo nominee.  Her collection Bibliomancy also earned her a World Fantasy Award. Hand received the James Tiptiree  Jr. Memorial Award and the Mythopoei Award for her novel Waking the Moon and she has won three Shirley Jackson Awards. Her stories “Pavane for a Prince of the Air” and “Cleopatra Brimstone” have both won the International Horror Guild Award.

“Calypso in Berlin” was originally published by Ellen Datlow in the July 13, 2005 issue of Sci Fiction. Paula Guran included it in her Best Paranormal Romance anthology the following year. It is included in Hand’s collection Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories. In 2007, the story was translated into German for publication in the Spring issue of Pandora.

In Greek mythology, Calypso was a nymph who lived on the island of Ogygia and kept Odysseus captive for seven years. Her name is a variation of the word “concealed.” In Elizabeth Hand’s “Calypso in Berlin,” the nymph has survived into the modern era and taken as her lover a man named Philip, whose business requires him to travel, so they only see each other occasionally. Philip is also married, which doesn’t particularly seem to bother Calypso.

When Philip ends their relationship, Calypso decides to relocate to Berlin, a city he loved. Once there, she realizes that Philip has become something of a muse to her, inspiring her paintings of him and without his presence, she can no longer paint. Using an old sweater of his and sympathetic magic, she draws him to her, regaining her muse. The magic Hand describes as Calypso ensures that he will always be in Berlin to inspire her feels very much in keeping with the motifs of Greek mythology.

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Birthday Reviews: A. Bertram Chandler’s “Planet of Ill Repute”

Birthday Reviews: A. Bertram Chandler’s “Planet of Ill Repute”

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Infinity Science Fiction November 1958-small Infinity Science Fiction November 1958-back-small

Cover by Ed Emshwiller

A. Bertram Chandler was born on March 18, 1912 and died on June 6, 1984.

Chandler has received four Ditmar Awards for his novels False Fatherland, The Bitter Pill, and The Big Black Mark, as well as the story version of “The Bitter Pill.” His story “Wet Paint” won the Seiun Award in 1976 and he was nominated for a Retro Hugo for his novella “Giant Killer.” Chandler was the author Guest of Honor at Chicon IV, the 1982 Worldcon in Chicago.

“Planet of Ill Repute” originally appeared in the November 1958 issue of Infinity Science Fiction, edited by Larry Shaw. The story was reprinted in the NESFA Press book Up to the Sky in Ships/In and Out of Quandry, released to coincide with the Chicon where Chandler was Guest of Honor.  Published in the Ace Double format, the Up to the Sky in Ships side contained stories by Chandler and the In and Out of Quandry side contained essays by fan Guest of Honor Lee Hoffman.  The cover for both sides was by Chicon Artist Guest of Honor Kelly Freas.

“Planet of Ill Repute” looks at “The Protection of Undeveloped Peoples Act,” which has stark similarities to Star Trek’s Prime Directive. In this case, when Commodore Pendray discovered that his men had run afoul of “The Act” during an initial survey of the planet Lishaar, he followed proper protocols, arresting the men responsible with the goal of having them court martialed.

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