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Random Reviews: “Dead Men on TV” by Pat Murphy

Random Reviews: “Dead Men on TV” by Pat Murphy

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Full Spectrum, edited by Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy, Cover by Peter Stallard
Full Spectrum, edited by Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy, Cover by Peter Stallard

Pat Murphy is best known for her 1986 Nebula Award winning novel The Falling Woman or her 1987 Nebula Award winning novelette “Rachel in Love.” The following year, she published the short story “Dead Men on TV” in the debut volume of Full Spectrum, edited by Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy.

The unnamed narrator of “Dead Men on TV” spends her nights watching old movies on television, specifically films in which her late father appeared. Through the story, she reveals that her family life had not been great. Her mother was not prepared for the lifestyle that being married to a Hollywood actor entailed and committed suicide when the narrator was young. Her father, who had ignored her mother before she killed herself, shifted his efforts to ignoring his daughter after he was widowed, focusing on his career and living the lifestyle of a star.

Watching television, therefore, is her way of attempting to reconnect with her father’s memory and build an ersatz relationship with him. Her need, however, to watch his films when they are on, no matter the time of day, is clearly unhealthy. Although she has videotaped many of his movies, she feels closer to him when watching them at a time that other people could be watching them as well, leading to many late nights in front of the screen.

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Vintage Treasures: The Gods of Bal-Sagoth by Robert E. Howard

Vintage Treasures: The Gods of Bal-Sagoth by Robert E. Howard

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The Gods of Bal-Sagoth (Ace, 1979). Cover by Sanjulian

I didn’t discover Robert E. Howard through Conan. In fact, it was decades after I started reading fantasy before I read my first Conan story (“The Tower of the Elephant,” for the record.)

No, it was Howard’s rich fiction collections from Ace Books in the late 70s and early 80s that really introduced me to the master of 20th Century sword & sorcery. They were filled with enthralling tales of blood-stained history, dark adventure, and unexpected horror, like “Worms of the Earth,” “Pigeons From Hell,” and “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth.”

And those gorgeous Sanjulian covers!

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Neverwhens, Where Fantasy and History Collide: Tanith Lee’s Cyrion

Neverwhens, Where Fantasy and History Collide: Tanith Lee’s Cyrion

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Cyrion (DAW, 1982, cover by Ken W. Kelly)

The Empress of Dreams

I hardly need to sing the praises of the late Tanith Lee (1947 – 2015).  A two-time World Fantasy winner, Horror Grandmaster, Hugo nominee, yadda yadda yadda, she rose out of nowhere writing sword & sorcery (generally a male-dominated field) with the Nebula-nominated The Birthgrave, and went on to pen 70 novels, 300 short stories and create a style of lush, dark fantasy perhaps best represented by her two best-known series: The Tales of the Flat Earth and The Books of Paradys.

Lee was goth before goths, and alternative before we knew that was a thing. Her style, which was lush and baroque, but not always straightforward for the reader, prose designed to read aloud. Her settings and atmospheres were strongly in the tradition of “the Weird,” owing much to the influence of writers such as Lord Dunsany and Jack Vance.

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Vintage Treasures: Heroic Fantasy edited by Gerald W. Page and Hank Reinhardt

Vintage Treasures: Heroic Fantasy edited by Gerald W. Page and Hank Reinhardt

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Heroic Fantasy (DAW, 1979). Cover by Jad

If you were a sword & sorcery fan in the 70s and 80s, there wasn’t a lot to get excited about. Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords anthologies. Andrew J. Offutt’s Swords Against Darkness, naturally. And the occasional Conan pastiche and Lancer paperback.

And there was Gerald W. Page and Hank Reinhardt’s one-shot anthology Heroic Fantasy, which came out of nowhere, never had a sequel, but was packed with terrific original stories by Charles Saunders, Andre Norton, Adrian Cole, E. C. Tubb, Tanith Lee, H. Warner Munn, Darrell Schweitzer, F. Paul Wilson, and Manly Wade Wellman — and kept readers talking for years.

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Random Reviews: “Slaves of the Magic Lamp” by Anthony R. Lewis

Random Reviews: “Slaves of the Magic Lamp” by Anthony R. Lewis

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Aladdin: Master of the Lamp, DAW 1992, Cover by Maren
Aladdin: Master of the Lamp, DAW 1992, Cover by Maren

In November 1992, Disney released the animated film Aladdin, with Scott Weinger providing the title character’s voice, Linda Larkin portraying his love, Jasmine, and the late and lamented Robin Williams voicing the Genie. About the same time, Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg edited an original anthology designed to take advantage of Disney’s new film. DAW Books published Aladdin: Master of the Lamp in December 1992, containing more than forty original stories by authors ranging from Janet Kagan and George Alex Effinger to Kate Daniel and Mark Aronson.

Atypical of most original anthologies, Aladdin: Master of the Lamp contains two stories each by Jack C. Haldeman II, Anthony R. Lewis, and Barry N. Malzberg. Lewis, who is best known as the Chair of twenty-ninth Worldcon, Noreascon, in 1970, and for the work he has done with NESFA Press, has also written several short stories, including “Fair Exchange,” which opens Resnick’s anthology, and “Slaves of the Magic Lamp,” which appears about half-way through.

Lewis elects to structure his story as a tale within a tale, although it isn’t clear that such a conceit is necessary, aside from playing homage to the version of the Aladdin story told in One Thousand and One Nights. In this case, the narrator is Lady Vashti, a cat/shapeshifter who exists outside the bounds of the physical world.

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Vintage Treasures: The Worlds of Fritz Leiber

Vintage Treasures: The Worlds of Fritz Leiber

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The Worlds of Fritz Leiber (Ace, 1976). Cover by Patrick Woodroffe

Fritz Leiber died 30 years ago, in 1992, but he’s in no real danger of being forgotten. His Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories remain poplar and are still in print, and so are many of his acclaimed novels and collections.

I wish more of his work was readily accessible to modern readers though, like his splendid 1976 collection The Worlds of Fritz Leiber. In his introduction Leiber said “I believe this collection represents me more completely… than any other,” and it’s not hard to see why. It contains both of his 60s-eras Dr. Dragonet adventures (“The Goggles of Dr. Dragonet” and “Far Reach to Cygnus”), a tale in his ambitious Change War time-war series (“When the Change-Winds Blow”), one Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story (“The Bait”), and his Hugo and Nebula-awarding winning “Catch That Zeppelin!”

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Taking Stock SF Ideas in New Directions: James Davis Nicoll on Alexis Gilliland’s The Rosinante Trilogy

Taking Stock SF Ideas in New Directions: James Davis Nicoll on Alexis Gilliland’s The Rosinante Trilogy

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The Revolution from Rosinante (1981), Long Shot for Rosinante (1981), and The Pirates of Rosinante
(1982), all published by Del Rey. Covers by Chris Barbieri (book 1) and Rick Sternbach (2 and 3)

It’s good to know there are other writers out there who obsess over vintage paperbacks the way I do. Well, there’s Rich Horton and James Davis Nicoll, anyway. And I enjoyed James’ thoughtful Tor.com article this week on the long-forgotten Rosinante Trilogy by Alexis Gilliland, published in the early 80s by Del Rey. Here’s his take:

Gilliland also had a lot of fun drawing on stock SF ideas and taking them in directions other authors of the time did not. Cantrell is, among other things, a deconstruction of those marvelous old-time SF engineers who never saw a cool idea sketched on a napkin that they did immediately put into effect without ever considering the ramifications… I don’t know why these books were not more popular, why they are not better known, or why there has been no new Gilliland book since the 1990s. The books’ brevity might have worked against them. Only one is more than 200 pages and the other two are closer to 185. They’re also remarkably eventful books: there is about a thousand pages of plot crammed into less than 600… they were fun and innovative in many ways. For those interested in judging for themselves, at least they are back in print.

Read the whole thing at Tor.com.

Random Reviews: “Rocketship Red” by Michael R. Colangelo

Random Reviews: “Rocketship Red” by Michael R. Colangelo

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Tesseracts 14, Edited by John Robert Colombo and Brett Alexander Savory, Cover by Erik Mohr
Tesseracts 14, Edited by John Robert Colombo and Brett Alexander Savory, Cover by Erik Mohr

Michael R. Colangelo’s “Rocketship Red” was published in the fourteenth installment of the long-running Canadian anthology series Tesseracts, a volume edited by John Robert Colombo and Brett Alexander Savory in 2010.  In addition to writing short fiction, Colangelo has served as a reviewer for FearZone and the fiction editor for The Harrow, an on-line zine that ran from 1998 until 2009.

“Rocketship Red” feels a bit like a throwback piece, the sort of story aimed at juveniles in the 1950s, which gives it an almost instantaneous feeling of nostalgia. It opens with Eagan running through the Canadian wheatfields near his father’s soy farm, flying a bright red kite and pretending the kite is a rocket and he’s its intrepid pilot. Although Eagan hated working the soy farm, he knew it would be his life, however a visit from two American air force captains who were coming to buy soy, would change the trajectory of his life.

Eagan’s interest in rockets and space, however, causes him to forge a bond with Captain Sampson, who tells Eagan to reach out to him when he turns seventeen and is able to attend “rocket flying school,” a phrase that reinforces the nostalgic element of the story. The rest of the story briefly outlines Eagan’s conflict with his father over leaving the soy farm, his attendance at the Flight Academy, and his career as a pilot, all covered in less than three pages.

If that seems like a lot to fit into a few short pages, it is. In many ways Colangelo’s story feels more like an outline for a longer story, or even a novel, that could follow Eagan’s journey from soy farmer’s son to cadet at the academy to his career flying rockets for the air force with explorations of Sampson’s mentorship of him.  Furthermore, Colangelo introduces various throw-away concepts in the story, such as antimatter farming projects, dark zones in space, and the rift.  None of these are given any detail, but they do serve to provide broad strokes for Eagan’s career.

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Vintage Treasures: Swords Against Darkness edited by Andrew J. Offutt

Vintage Treasures: Swords Against Darkness edited by Andrew J. Offutt

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Swords Against Darkness (Zebra Books, February 1977). Cover  by Frank Frazetta

Sword Against Darkness was a seminal five-volume sword & sorcery anthology series edited by Andrew J. Offutt in the late seventies (1977-79). It published original fantasy by some of the biggest names of the era, including Andre Norton, Tanith Lee, Keith Taylor, Charles de Lint, Charles R. Saunders, Orson Scott Card, Simon R. Green, David C. Smith, Robert E. Vardeman, Darrell Schweitzer, Diana L. Paxson, and many others.

The first volume appeared in early 1977, and it was one of the strongest original fantasy anthologies of the decade, packed full of tales of the haunted Roman frontier, a plague of giants, the wily goddess of Chance, the last survivor of Atlantis, Lovecraftian horrors, scheming demons, resourceful rogues facing evil spirits, and much more. It included a Simon of Gitta novelette by Richard L. Tierney, a powerful Robert E. Howard fragment completed by Andrew J. Offutt, plus Poul Anderson, Manly Wade Wellman, David Drake, Ramsey Campbell, and many others.

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A Master With a Keen Eye: Robert Silverberg’s Original Anthologies of the 1970s

A Master With a Keen Eye: Robert Silverberg’s Original Anthologies of the 1970s

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Paperback editions of Silverberg 70s original anthologies. Published by (left to right, from top left):
Dell, Manor Books, Dell, Manor Books, Dell, Dell, Fontana, Warner Books, Pinnacle

In 1966 Robert Silverberg published his first anthology, an unassuming volume titled Earthmen and Strangers from staid New York press Duell, Sloan and Pearce, known mostly for the infamous U.S. Camera 1941 annual that was banned in Boston for daring to include nudes. Earthmen and Strangers was hugely successful, remaining in print for an astonishing two decades, with paperback reprints from Dell, Manor Books, and Bart Books, and Silverberg was off to the races as an editor. Over the next five decades he published dozens of science fiction anthologies, including a handful of bestsellers like the seminal Legends (1998) and its science-fictional sequel Far Horizons (1999).

Beginning in the late 60s and all through the 70s Silverberg produced a steady stream of original anthologies, most of which had a signature format: each contained three novellas from the biggest names in the industry, including major award nominees by James Blish, Gordon R. Dickson, Jack Vance, Clifford D. Simak, Norman Spinrad, Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. Le Guin, and James Tiptree, Jr. — plus novellas by Roger Zelazny, R. A. Lafferty, Harry Harrison, Alexei Panshin, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, John Brunner, George Alec Effinger, Gardner Dozois, Gregory Benford, Joan D. Vinge, Vonda N. McIntyre, Keith Roberts, James Gunn, Phyllis Gotlieb, and many others.

Like Terry Carr’s Universe, Damon Knight’s Orbit, and Silverberg’s own New Dimensions, these anthologies were prestige fiction markets, appearing in hardcover and distributed to libraries, and getting a lot of attention when awards season rolled around. As a result they attracted a lot of talent. Silverberg was a master with a keen eye for emerging talent, and an uncanny ability to coax top-notch work of out his contributors. The books still make entertaining reading today.

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