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In 500 Words or Less: Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird, edited by Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski

In 500 Words or Less: Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird, edited by Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski

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Ride the Star Wind
Edited by Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski
Broken Eye Books (445 pages, $39.99 hardcover/$19.99 paperback, February 2016)

When Scott Gable at Broken Eye Books offered me a review copy of Ride the Star Wind, an anthology that combines space opera with Lovecraftian weirdness, I told him straight up that I’m not really a fan of the Elder Gods, the Great Ones, and the rest. I get why Lovecraft’s shadow is so long (sort of) but honestly his writing never appealed to me, and I think his work is adapted too much, and usually badly. (I make one exception with Jonathan Maberry’s Kill Switch, which is awesome.)

That said… and work with me here, since I’m not supposed to curse… but @#$% this is a great anthology. I mean, after how much I enjoyed Never Now Always by Desirina Boskovich (also a Broken Eye title) I wasn’t really worried, but the stories in here hooked me way more than I expected.

Some are a little too weird for me, I’ll admit, but those are few and far between. If you’re into weird (unlike me) there’s material here for you, particularly Bogi Takács “A Subordinate Set of Principles,” which involves deadly creatures that are literally referred to by square and triangle symbols in the text because they’re impossible to describe. I’m going to have to reread that one.

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A Homecoming: Son of Mfumu by Milton J. Davis

A Homecoming: Son of Mfumu by Milton J. Davis

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DIhhmcBUQAAjNxv“…keep it old school. Don’t make it boring, pack it with action, don’t invert it, converge it, or subvert it. Have a hero even if he is a rascal. Have some gothic atmosphere and a touch of cosmicism. Give it technicolor and dream dust instead of shades of gray. Have the ending mean something.”  -Morgan Holmes, on writing a classic S&S story.

Milton Davis’ five volume series about the mighty and wily Changa Diop is swords & sorcery cast from a classic mold, the dimensions of which were first set down ninety years ago by Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and C.L. Moore. Changa is a hero through and through. Even when he’s got one eye focused on making a profit, the other is on his own honor and courage. There are wonderful descriptions of a vibrant, exciting world designed perfectly as a stage for mighty adventures, but done so well it never impedes the action. Of action, there’s more than enough for any S&S fan, ranging from duels with pirates to epic battles with demonic conjurations. Heroes are bold and villains deadly. This is the root stuff of which good S&S is made.

Whenever you get bummed out about the current state of S&S, rest assured that there are authors hewing to something like Holmes’ cri-de-coeur. And they aren’t making copies of the tried and true, but crafting their own myths and legends, adding their rousing additions to this genre we love.

Starting with Changa’s Safari (2011), and continuing for four more books, Milton Davis has sent our titular hero to the ends of the earth in search of the means to avenge his father’s murder, and claim the throne of Kongo from the usurper and sorcerer, Usenge. Each comrade with whom he surrounds himself is skilled and memorable in his own way. Foremost, there is the blue-robed and silent swordsman known only as the Tuareg. Zakee is a young Yemeni prince rescued from a disastrous marriage, the irascible navigator Mikaili is an Ethiopian with plans to become an priest someday…just never today, and finally there is Panya, Yoruban sorceress and beloved of Changa.

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Elric and Me

Elric and Me

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Elric of Melnibone-small The Sailor on the Seas of Fate-small

My introduction to Michael Moorcock’s Elric came from a single line in the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master Guide. Gary Gygax included a note in Appendix N that Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer and Stealer of Souls, as well as the first three books of the Hawkmoon series, influenced the game. I sought out the Elric cycle (as well as the Hawkmoon, Corum, Erekosë, etc.) in the DAW editions with cover art by Michael Whelan.

It was a great time to discover the books, since they were all in print and relatively easy to obtain. I worked my way through as many of Moorcock’s books as I could find, including his Dancers at the End of Time series, Michael Kane/Warrior of Mars series, and even books like The Black Corridor, The Wrecks of Time, and The Shores of Limbo. I remember my elation upon finding a used copy of The Ice Schooner in a used bookstore in New Haven, CT after searching for it through several states in those pre-internet days.

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The Road of Azrael by Robert E. Howard

The Road of Azrael by Robert E. Howard

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TRDOZRL1979I can remember when my dad brought home The Road of Azrael (1979) and Sowers of the Thunder (1980), collections of Robert E. Howard’s historical adventure tales. My reading tastes were so exclusively fantasy and science fiction then, I couldn’t imagine wasting any time on boring, mundane stories. No wizards, no demons? What the heck was anybody thinking?

I grew out of that attitude a few years later and read both volumes. I remember liking them, but if you asked me for details on either one, I couldn’t have told you a thing. I read them once and never again. In fact, until recently I hadn’t read any other historical adventure even though, theoretically at least, I was a fan. I mean, it’s one of the primary root sources of swords & sorcery. At a very basic level, Robert E. Howard took the historical adventures of writers like Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy and added magic and monsters.

It wasn’t until I started blogging about swords & sorcery and started getting all sorts of recommendations for the stuff that I looked into the genre again. With my review of Henry Treece’s The Great Captains four years ago, I started including some novels in my writing for Black Gate. I’ve been including a taste every month or so (most recently Purity of Blood by Arturo Pérez-Reverte), and it’s gone over well.

One of the pledges I made to myself at the start of my Black Gate tenure four years ago, was to avoid the big names of swords & sorcery. No one, I felt, needed another article about Michael Moorcock, or Fritz Leiber, or especially Robert E. Howard. Considering I wrote about Karl Edward Wagner’s Night Winds for my very first full review, THAT promise didn’t last very long, but I have tried to keep my focus on lesser-known or forgotten authors in my reviews of older works. Since then, I’ve reviewed a Moorcock book, a new one by Charles Saunders, and several more Wagner books, but until now I’ve steered clear of REH (especially because Bob Byrne has done a terrific job writing about him here at BG in his ongoing Discovering Robert E. Howard columns). It’s too hard to completely avoid the foundational figures of swords & sorcery when writing as often as I do, but I try to keep it to a minimum.

All this is a complicated way to say I’m reviewing The Road of Azrael by Robert E. Howard, and feel fully justified in doing so. It collects five historical tales of varying quality.

The paperback edition I read has execrable cover art, which did nothing to add appeal for me. Fortunately, the first thing in the book is a laudatory introduction by Gordon Dickson, no slouch of a storyteller himself, praising REH’s storytelling talents. Not that I need reminding of just how good Howard could be, but it’s always nice to see him get the praise he deserves. Unfortunately, I did not like the opening story, “Hawks Over Egypt.”

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Series Wrap-Up

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Series Wrap-Up

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Last week I concluded my book-by-book look at Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar novels, the prehistoric world inside the Earth’s crust where the stationary sun eradicates the passage of time. The complete series consists of seven books:

Compared to Burroughs’s other two long-running science-fiction series, Mars/Barsoom and Venus/Amtor, Pellucidar is more difficult to summarize. The Venus novels were written over a short period of time during the end of Burroughs’s career and all feature the same hero, Carson Napier. There are no Venus classics, with the best (Lost on Venus) only middling and the rest ranging from bland to unreadable. The Mars series presents a vast canvas that arcs across Burroughs’s career, but it’s the most consistently high quality of any of his series, including the Tarzan novels, so it’s not too difficult to give it a broad analysis that primarily looks at changes in protagonists.

The Pellucidar books, however, present conundrums when consumed in a short period. Like Mars, Pellucidar spans the major phases of ERB’s career: success in the ‘teens, a stabilizing period in the twenties, a steepening decline throughout the thirties, a World War II revival, and a “lost” story and final volume published posthumously in the sixties. Unlike Mars, Burroughs visited Pellucidar sporadically, with a fourteen-year lapse after the first two paired novels, and later a seven-year gap.

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Tom Sutton’s Creepy Things

Tom Sutton’s Creepy Things

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Creepy ThingsNobody does good horror anthology comics any longer. Oh sure, some micro-press might release an issue here and there every couple of years, but it’s not like the days when you could go to any drug store in the country and find a dozen different horror collections on the spinner racks. Horror anthology comics first got big in the 1950s, before the Comics Code brought an end to all of that gory goodness. Flash forward to the Bronze Age of Comics (beginning roughly some time in the early 1970s), when the children who’d read Golden Age comics had grown up and gone into the industry for themselves. Bronze Age horror comics borrowed heavily from Golden Age titles like Tales from the Crypt and Chamber of Chills. But since they could never match those titles for outright gore (the Comics Code still being in place), they instead relied on sheer weirdness. And if you’re researching weird 1970s horror (which I frequently do), you’re going to run across the name Tom Sutton.

Just like in the 1950s, every comic book publisher in the 1970s printed at least a couple of horror anthology titles and each title achieved a different level of success. DC Comics had almost a dozen different titles at the height of the horror boom (House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Witching Hour, Weird War Tales, Secrets of Sinister House, Ghosts, Secrets of Haunted House, Tales of Forbidden Mansion, Weird Mystery Tales, Unexpected). Marvel Comics had fewer anthology titles, specializing instead in recurring monster books (Werewolf by Night, Monster of Frankenstein, Tomb of Dracula). Warren slipped around the Comics Code by publishing black-and-white oversized “magazines” that could have more violence and nudity (Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella). And all but forgotten in the comics shuffle is Charlton Comics, always less popular than Marvel, DC, or Warren. Part of the problem was that Charlton notoriously offered some of the lowest pay rates to artists and writers, making them less popular for the A-list talent.

On the other hand, what Charlton could offer was far less editorial interference. As long as the art and story didn’t violate the Comics Code, they gave their artists and writers a free hand to tell whatever stories they wanted. It’s likely one of the reasons that comic legends like Steve Ditko frequently worked with them. And it’s why Tom Sutton’s most interesting work was done for their titles (The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves, Ghost Manor, Haunted Love, Ghostly Haunts, Midnight Tales, Haunted, Monster Hunters). The folks at Yoe Books have collected sixteen of those stories in a stunning hardcover collection. It opens with an overview of Sutton’s career written by Michael Ambrose, followed by a selection of old cover illustrations, then the first story.

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Saucer Country

Saucer Country

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Saucer-Country-smallRead this book. Go to your nearest comic shop and pick up the trade paperback collection. Don’t know where your nearest comic shop is located? Go to the Comic Shop Locator, type in your zip code and find out. Is it just easier to order a copy online and have it delivered to your home? Then go to IDW Publishing and order a copy. You can even order a digital copy if you don’t want to wait for delivery.

Why do you need to read this book? Because this comic book is about what’s going on right now.

The story begins with Arcadia Alvarado, governor of New Mexico and Presidential candidate. It’s a story about a woman running for President. It’s a story about the daughter of Mexican immigrants. It’s also a story about a woman who was abducted by aliens. So, yeah, this is a comic book (written in 2012, by the way) that deals with the possibility of a woman running for President as the candidate of a major political party. It’s also a comic book about a Presidential campaign where immigration reform is a key issue. It’s also a comic book about a Presidential campaign mired in conspiracy theories that leave people uncertain about what to believe. But that’s not what’s going on right now. That’s what went on in 2016.

Arcadia Alvarado was forcibly removed from her car by strangers. She was stripped naked and had a foreign object inserted in her anus. She was told afterwards that no one would believe her story if she said what happened and even if someone did believe her, there was nothing anyone could do about it. Either way, if she tells anyone about what happened, she believes that her career will be over.

Saucer Country is a story about rape. It’s about a group of powerful individuals who routinely abuse people and suffer no consequences for their actions. It’s about victims too afraid to speak out until one woman finds the courage to name her abusers. And it’s about the friends, family, and co-workers who urge her to stay quiet for her own good. If none of that sounds hauntingly familiar, you haven’t been paying attention to current events.

Saucer Country is more relevant today than when it was originally written. Find a copy and see for yourself.

Michael Penkas is an infrequent contributor to Black Gate. His mystery novel, Mistress Bunny and the Cancelled Client, is available in lots of different places. He maintains a website that you should check out.

Mage: The Hero Denied #4

Mage: The Hero Denied #4

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Mage-4-smallA short review this month simply because there’s not so much to unpack here. The Umbra Sprite, the Gracklethorns, Kevin’s wife, and Kevin’s children are all absent from this issue. Meaning that it’s just Kevin and some monster lady that we’ve never seen before (and will probably never see again).

Really, this issue is meant to tie us back to themes from Hero Discovered and Hero Defined, so if you haven’t read those titles first, none of it will make any sense to you. The Queen of the Unending Dead tells Kevin that he’s the reincarnation (or avatar) of Gilgamesh, which is something broached in Hero Defined. She also tells him that the Lord of the Hunt has a claim on his soul, which is something already suggested in Hero Discovered. Then he fights an army of zombies. Then he kills the Queen of the Unending Dead with an exploding park bench. Then he falls off a cliff. Then he gets in an argument with an ATM.

Honestly, after five issues in (I’m counting issue #0), I get why some people might start pulling out of this series. Comics are expensive, we’re in almost twenty dollars deep here, and we really haven’t gotten that much of a story yet. Yeah, Matt Wagner’s art is always crisp and vibrant, no matter what he’s drawing. But Kevin pretty much wandered away from everyone else in the plot to have a fight with yet another monster and hasn’t learned anything that he didn’t already know from the first two volumes of this series. I get that, from the title of the series, he’s not going to win this one, but it feels weird that we’ve got an antagonist who’s still making the same mistakes after all these years, partially invalidating the value of his supposed lessons in previous books.

Of course, I’m sticking around to the bitter end on this one. But if the rest of you want to save your money and come back at the end for the collected edition, I totally understand.

Mage #4 is available in print at all decent comic shops, as are back issues to volumes one and two of the series. If you prefer getting your comics digitally, then check out Mage: The Hero Discovered, Mage: The Hero Defined, and all the latest issues of Mage: The Hero Denied at Comixology.

Michael Penkas has been a fan of Matt Wagner for longer than some of you have been alive. He’s written a dominatrix detective mystery novel, Mistress Bunny and the Cancelled Client, as well as dozens of ghost stories. He occasionally maintains a website and regularly participates at various reading events throughout Chicago.

A Mashup Between 2001 and The Walking Dead: Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

A Mashup Between 2001 and The Walking Dead: Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

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When you crack open the cover of Illuminae (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), the first thing you read is a memo to Executive Director Frobisher written by someone with a ghost ID. The memo explains that the rest of the book contains public documents exposing a secret corporate war. You don’t know who Executive Director Frobisher is. You also don’t know who’s using the ghost ID. But you will by the last page of the book, and this information will make you want to start re-reading the novel all over again.

But for now, all you’ve read is the memo. Turning the page, you encounter an interview filed with the United Terran Navy between an anonymous staffer and sarcastic teenager Kady Grant. Yes, Kady has a bad attitude. No, Kady isn’t a team player. But you’ll roar with laughter as she figuratively pies the interviewer in the face time and time again when he asks questions about her escape from the violent invasion of her planet. You’d be unwise to underestimate her. She might be short, but she’s good with computers.

Interspersed with Kady’s interview is another with Ezra Mason, the guy she broke up with the morning of the invasion. (At one point, Kady explains to her interviewer, she and Ezra were dodging explosions and ground troops when he says to her: “You picked a hell of a day to dump me, Kades.”)

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Savage Pellucidar

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Savage Pellucidar

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savage-pellucidar-canaveral-press-edition-coverHave we already arrived at the end of Pellucidar? It feels like I started examining this Edgar Rice Burroughs series only a few months ago — but it’s been almost a year since I drilled down to visit At the Earth’s Core. A year may have passed for me, but thirty has passed for Burroughs, and counting the time until the last unpublished novella was collected in Savage Pellucidar, the gap widens to fifty years. If you read At the Earth’s Core in the pulps as an enthusiastic thirteen-year-old, you’d be close to retirement age by the time you could buy the last book and have a complete Pellucidar set.

Wait, what am I talking about? This is Pellucidar. Time is meaningless here! I started writing this article series yesterday — or maybe a century ago, and the books were all published either over a span of one year or five hundred years. It’s all the same under the perpetual noonday sun.

Our Saga: Beneath our feet lies a realm beyond the most vivid daydreams of the fantastic … Pellucidar. A subterranean world formed along the concave curve inside the earth’s crust, surrounding an eternally stationary sun that eliminates the concept of time. A land of savage humanoids, fierce beasts, and reptilian overlords, Pellucidar is the weird stage for adventurers from the topside layer — including a certain Lord Greystoke. The series consists of six novels, one which crosses over with the Tarzan series, plus a volume of linked novellas, published between 1914 and 1963.

Today’s Installment: Savage Pellucidar (1963)

Previous Installments: At the Earth’s Core (1914), Pellucidar (1915), Tanar of Pellucidar (1929), Tarzan at the Earth’s Core (1929–30), Back to the Stone Age (1937), Land of Terror (1944)

The Backstory

I’ve told this tale before with Escape on Venus and Llana of Gathol, the sister works of Savage Pellucidar, but once more won’t hurt. At the start of the 1940s, Edgar Rice Burroughs experimented writing novels in three of his settings — Mars, Venus, and Pellucidar — as sets of four linked novellas. Each novella was capable of standing on its own but could later fit together with the other three for book publication. The idea may have been the suggestion of Cyril Ralph Rothmund, business manager for ERB Inc., who first wrote a letter to the editor of Ziff-Davis Magazines with the format proposal. It was an experiment of necessity, since the pulps were turning away from serializations as more of the weekly magazines dropped to monthly publication. Burroughs approached the three books as a round-robin, changing from one setting to the next to finish all the novellas.

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