Black Gate

Starhammer, The Vang: The Military Form and The Vang: The Battlemaster
(Del Rey, 1986 – 1990). Covers by David Schleinkofer and Stephen Hickman

I’m a huge fan of modern science fiction, and I find no shortage of new novels and and series to coo over here. But there are times when I miss the old-school SF of last century, rooted in the Cold War paranoia of the 50s and 60s. The Golden Age of invaders from space, all-consuming blobs, and gooey alien parasites that have their sights set on your lower G.I. tract.

In the late 80s Christopher Rowley, author of the popular Battle Dragons series from Roc, had a hit with his Vang novels, a space opera/alien parasite hybrid. Clearly inspired by the author’s love of Alien and pulp-era SF by A.E. Van Vogt, Jack Vance, Eric Frank Russell, and others, the trilogy — Starhammer, The Vang: The Military Form and The Vang: The Battlemaster — had the sweep of epic space opera crossed with the gritty realism of James Cameron’s Colonial Marines.

The story of The Vang begins when the asteroid miner Seed of Hope, illegally prospecting in a Forbidden Sector of the Saskatch system, finds a billion year-old vessel containing an alien horror, the last vestige of a race nearly annihilated in an ancient conflict that convulsed the galaxy. It’s an encounter that will plunge humanity into a desperate war of survival.

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Quarreling, They Met the Dragon, Journey to Membliar, and Burning Tears of Sassurum
(Avon, 1984, 1987, and 1988). Covers by Wayne Barlowe, Paul Lehr, and Ron Walotsky

Sharon Baker died in Seattle in June 1991, at the much-too-young age of 53. She began writing in her 40s, while she was busy raising four sons. In a Gale Contemporary Author interview in 1986 she said

I felt like a car appliance [and] to remind myself that I was not, I signed up for a weekly writing class… On good days, I no longer feel like an appendage of my station wagon or anything else. I feel like me. And I like it.

Her first novel was Quarreling, They Met the Dragon, published in 1984, and it drew immediate attention. In Trillion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss praised it as evidence of “An original mind at work on an ingenious world.” Gene Wolfe said “Sharon Baker is better than good… [she will be] one of the field’s most important author’s by the close of this decade,” and Publishers Weekly compared her to Samuel R, Delany.

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Tales from the Spaceport Bar and Another Round at the Spaceport Bar
(Avon Books, 1987 and 1989). Covers by James Warhola and Doug Beekman

Science fiction has a rep for being serious stuff. Tales of dystopias, climate catastrophes and environmental collapse, dire warnings about worrying trends, that’s SF in a nutshell. Even dressed up in its best story-telling adventure garb, Star Wars or Mad Max-style, it’s still often perceived as all about desperate battles in apocalyptic settings.

Of course, science fiction is much broader and richer than that, and most of its best writers have amply demonstrated their love of whimsy and fun. One of SF’s best-loved sub-genres is the Club Tale/Bar Story, exemplified by Arthur C. Clarke’s famous Tales From the White Hart, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s long-running Gavagan’s Bar stories, Lord Dunsany’s Jorkens tales, Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers mysteries, Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Bar, Larry Niven’s spacefaring tales of Draco Tavern, and many others.

In the late 80s Weird Tales editors George H. Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer assembled a collection of the best such stories, Tales from the Spaceport Bar. It made the Locus Award list of Year’s Best Anthologies (in 11th place), and was quickly followed by Another Round at the Spaceport Bar. Both books are a fine antidote to anyone who’s dabbled just a little too long on the dark side of science fiction.

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