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Category: Vintage Treasures

Stop the Madness: Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz

Stop the Madness: Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz

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A Canticle for Leibowitz (Bantam Books reprint edition, August 1976). Cover by Lou Feck

In Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, the humor is bleak, and the future worse. First published as a series of three stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1955-57, and then assembled into a fix-up novel in October of 1959, Canticle is a novel pinned like a helpless butterfly to the Cold War terror of nuclear annihilation – a notion that was then fresh and febrile, but has now faded into the background, as Miller predicted, to our sorrow, that it would. The book itself remains a damning, furious read, yet it comes across, mostly, as contained – peaceful, even – as bucolic as any given warhead, up until it’s armed.

Miller’s dismay at humanity’s trajectory spills across every page, but this is no screed. He’s a story-teller, and a thoughtful, crafty one, and so he buries his polemics inside a cautious tri-partite structure, along with enough Latin to make this non-Catholic take to his on-line translator (a trick that Miller, in ‘59, could only dream of).

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Cimmerian September – Conan and The Lost Valley of Iskander

Cimmerian September – Conan and The Lost Valley of Iskander

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Welcome back to week three of Cimmerian September.

Now, El Borak rivals Conan for my favorite REH character. I REALLY enjoy those stories. And I like Kirby O’Donnell, and I’ve covered those three tales, here at Black Gate. “Sword of the Hills”/”The Lost Valley of Iskander” is one of my favorites. It’s more like a Conan tale than any of the others. In fact, back in the days before Heroic Signatures started pushing out lots of new pastiches (some good, some less so), I started turning “Lost Valley…” into a Conan pastiche.

It was just for fun, whereas I’ve been very serious about my Sherlock Holmes, Solar Pons, and Nero Wolfe fiction. But if I were going to ‘do Conan,’ it would be with this story. Here’s the opening, which mirrors the El Borak original. 

Whatever you may think of this fragment, you absolutely should check out El Borak, if you haven’t. Dave Hardy wrote a killer essay about ‘The Swift’ for Discovering Robert E. Howard (he also wrote the Del Rey intro). So, read on!

The skittering of a stone broke the stillness and instantly awoke Conan, sleeping in the shadows of a rocky crag. With almost inhuman quickness, his right arm shot up and grasped a wiry wrist, halting the descent of a curved knife that glinted not in the starless sky. Corded muscles flexed, and the newcomer hissed between his teeth as he struggled in vain to push the knife through to its destination. The attacker’s weight held the Cimmerian on his back, but Conan brought his left hand up in a fist and smashed it into the side of his attacker’s head, barely noticeable pain bursting through his knuckles as they connected with the man’s skull.

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Mary Poppins by PL Travers

Mary Poppins by PL Travers

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Mary Poppins gave a superior sniff.

“Don’t you know,” she said pitingly, “that everybody’s got a Fairyland of their own?”

Ultimately, I have Baird Searles (or you have to blame) to thank for pointing to P.L. Travers‘ original Mary Poppins books. To quote the entry in his A Reader’s Guide to Fantasy (1982),

Those who know P.L. TRAVER’s acerbic creation, Mary Poppins, only through the persona of Julie Andrews, do not really know Mary Poppins, despite the best efforts of that charming actress. Mary Poppins seldom has a kind word for anyone, almost never smiles except at heir own prim reflections, and can get four children washed and in bed with No Nonsense Whatsoever.

I didn’t rush out and buy the books, but his words always lingered in my memory, and when I saw the books for sale in the old Borders in the World Trade Center, I bought the first one, Mary Poppins (1934), and promptly devoured it. Strains of the book and its sequels can be heard in the Julie Andrews’ movie, but there are deeper, more mythic moments that I imagine Walt Disney wanted no part of.

Travers was born Helen Lyndon Goff in Australia in 1899. She took to the stage as a teenager, creating for herself the stage name Pamela Lyndon Travers. For several years she traveled in Australia and New Zealand as part of a Shakespearean company. In New Zealand, she became a published poet and later a primary writer for the women’s sections in a Christchurch newspaper.

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Almost Gothic: The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers

Almost Gothic: The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers

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The Nine Tailors, first edition (Harcourt, Brace, 1934)

The Nine Tailors has been described as the best of Dorothy Sayers’s novels. It certainly has many of the features of classic literary fiction, including a small rural community as a setting; a cast of characters from every level of society; and elaborate symbolism focused on a set of church bells, each with a meaningful name. Indeed the entire novel seems to have a symbolic level of meaning over and above the literal plot of the mystery. Of course mystery novels nearly all begin in medias res, with the discovery of a death, after which the detective reconstructs the previous events; but this novel’s backstory reaches back roughly two decades, to the Great War, and includes much more than the death.

The title The Nine Tailors alludes to the old saying “Nine tailors make a man.” This is sometimes taken as a slur on tailors as cowards or weaklings, saying that one real man is worth nine of them; but Sayers has in mind a custom of ringing nine strokes of a church bell for a man’s death, six for a woman’s, or three for a child’s. There are several deaths in the course of the novel.

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Becoming a Reader

Becoming a Reader

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Andre Norton’s Janus novels: Judgment on Janus and Victory on Janus (Fawcett Crest, December 1979 and January 1980). Covers by Ken Barr

I read a lot as a kid and read widely, sampling anything I could find. I always had books on my “want to read” list but also had a lot of chores and never had as much time to read as I wanted.

As a result, when I was a teenager and we were “assigned” readings for school, I resented it. I already knew a dozen books in the library I wanted to read as soon as I could get to them. And, too often, the assigned books were not nearly as colorful or interesting as the stuff I was already reading.

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Sour Bill: The Issue at Hand and More Issues at Hand by William Atheling, Jr.

Sour Bill: The Issue at Hand and More Issues at Hand by William Atheling, Jr.

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The Issue at Hand, by William Atheling, Jr., AKA James Blish (Advent: Publishers, 1964). Cover by Jon Stopa

In 1952, a science fiction fanzine, Sky Hook, began publishing a series of critical essays by William Atheling, Jr. When its publisher, Redd Boggs, suspended publication, the science fiction writer James Blish publicly revealed that this was a pseudonym he had adopted. But a few years later, he revived “Atheling” for more criticism, published in another fanzine, Axe.

In 1964, Advent: Publishers collected his critical writings, including both fanzine articles and addresses given at science fiction conventions under his own name, as The Issue at Hand, credited to Atheling, “edited and with an introduction by James Blish,” though the book made no secret of the author’s identity. In 1970, a second collection appeared, More Issues at Hand.

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David C. Smith, Part 5: Sometime Lofty Towers, A Magnificent Work of Sword & Sorcery

David C. Smith, Part 5: Sometime Lofty Towers, A Magnificent Work of Sword & Sorcery

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Sometime Lofty Towers (Brackenbury Books, December 2025). Cover by Saša Đurđević

I’ve just finished reading what may be David C. Smith’s best work — Sometime Lofty Towers.

My first contact with Smith was from the Robert E. Howard related pastiche work he did earlier in his career. He wrote an excellent Black Vulmea story, The Witch of the Indies (Zebra, 1977, cover by Stephen Fabian), and a Bran Mak Morn tale, Witch of the Mists with Richard Tierney (Zebra, 1978, cover by Doug Beekman), and he and Tierney (1936 –2022) collaborated on six novels about Red Sonja. The Sonja tales are not REH pastiches, of course, but are based on a comic book character created to interact with Conan in the Marvel series.

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David C. Smith, Part 4: The Fall of the First World and Four Horror Novels

David C. Smith, Part 4: The Fall of the First World and Four Horror Novels

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The Fall of the First World trilogy by David C Smith, from Pinnacle Books (1983). Covers by Carl Lundgren and Kevin Johnson

David C. Smith also wrote a trilogy of fantasy novels under the collective heading of The Fall of the First World. These were all released in 1983 from Pinnacle Books and are:

1. The Master of Evil, January 1983. Cover by Carl Lundgren
2. Sorrowing Vengeance, September 1983. Cover by Carl Lundgren
3. The Passing of the Gods, December 1983. Cover by Kevin Johnson

This trilogy is less Sword & Sorcery and more High Fantasy, although it’s not exactly that either. It’s hard to categorize. In some ways, the political maneuverings in the series are a harbinger for later series such as Game of Thrones.

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Vampires, Shoggoths, and the Monsters of the Suburbs: The Year’s Best Horror Stories XVI, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Vampires, Shoggoths, and the Monsters of the Suburbs: The Year’s Best Horror Stories XVI, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

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The Year’s Best Horror Stories XVI (DAW Books, October 1988). Cover by J.K. Potter

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: XVI was the sixteenth in the lineup and the eighth volume edited by the great Karl Edward Wagner (d. 1994). This book was copyrighted and printed in 1988 and represents the best short horror in the field for 1987. After twelve straight covers with Michael Whelan’s art, we now have a new cover artist, American illustrator J. K. Potter (b. 1956).

If this were published today, I’d think we’d suspect the cover was AI-generated. It looks almost photographic; but rather than being scary, it seems a little silly to me. But it’s still a horrific scene and was also on the cover the convention booklet in 1986 for the 12th World Fantasy Convention (see below). I’m sure in the mid-1980s it was quite original.

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A Science Fiction Film Noir: Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

A Science Fiction Film Noir: Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

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Lord of Light (Avon Books, January 1969). Cover by Ronald Walotsky

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god.

Roger Zelazny was considered to be one of the major New Wave writers of the 1960s. But where many of those writers found inspiration in naturalism, modernism, or even surrealism, much of Zelazny’s work was inspired by mythology, somewhat in the style of poets such as Yeats or Eliot.

Early novels in this mode included The Dream Master (expanded from the novella “He Who Shapes”), This Immortal (originally titled And Call Me Conrad, which I think is a much better choice), and Lord of Light, which I’ve long considered his single greatest literary achievement.

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