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Category: Vintage Treasures

A Year of Demonic Public Service: The Fallible Fiend by L. Sprague de Camp

A Year of Demonic Public Service: The Fallible Fiend by L. Sprague de Camp

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The Fallible Fiend (Signet/New American Library, February 1973). Cover uncredited

This is another in my series of looks at fairly obscure SF from the ’70s and ’80s. In this case, I rescued a book that I had bought used decades ago from the chaos of my bookshelves. Most of the other writers I’ve discussed so far have been somewhat forgotten (or were never really known at all) but L. Sprague de Camp is an SFWA Grand Master, and a writer I and many others remember with great affection.

De Camp (1907-2000) began publishing SF in 1937 with “The Isolingual,” and was from the beginning a popular and prolific writer. He wrote both Fantasy and Science Fiction, though by the end of his long career the bulk of his work was Fantasy. His preferred mode was lightly cynical humor — this imbued his SF such as the Viagens Interplanetarias series, and his Fantasy beginning with his Incomplete Enchanter stories written with Fletcher Pratt.

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Lovely Ladies and Pleistocene Behemoths: A Visit to the Hollow Earth with Edgar Rice Burroughs

Lovely Ladies and Pleistocene Behemoths: A Visit to the Hollow Earth with Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Caroline Munro, and a pair of Pleistocene behemoths, in At the Earth’s Core

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with “hollow earth” stories, a style of fantasy fiction that presents ancient, lost societies of people (and/or humanoids) living deep under the earth, where Jurassic and Pleistocene behemoths — as well as uncategorized horrors — struggle to survive in the subterranean jungles of a sunless world.

My favorite of this genre is the Pellucidar series, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which began in 1914 when At the Earth’s Core was serialized in All-Story Weekly, before the novel was published in book format.

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Christopher Moore and His Very Dirty Job

Christopher Moore and His Very Dirty Job

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When talking about banning books, nobody mentions Christopher Moore. No doubt Moore is upset about this, because he’s out to offend pretty much everybody. The fact that he does this with glee, panache, and massive gobs of bathroom humor probably doesn’t signify, and certainly won’t save his neck when the book-banning trolls finally come for him. The fact is, he’s funny, and there’s nothing the book-banners hate more than a healthy sense of the absurd.

An excellent case in point is Moore’s A Dirty Job, in which unassuming Charlie Asher, a second-hand dealer in San Francisco, becomes a “death merchant,” a sort of dogsbody for Death, who, it seems, has left the field, possibly never to return. It’s Charlie’s job to match dying people with their “soul vessel,” usually some knick-knack or other with sentimental value, in part so that the dead can find rest, and in part to prevent Orcus, lurking in the sewers, from eating up the soul vessels and rising again to usher in an age of darkness and doom.

That’s right, Orcus. Our old friend from the original AD&D Monster Manual. Etc.

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A to Z Reviews: “The City of Silence,” by Ma Boyong

A to Z Reviews: “The City of Silence,” by Ma Boyong

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A to Z Reviews

Over the past several years, the Anglophonic worlds has become more aware of the science fiction being published in modern China. This is due, in part, to the work and outreach being done by Science Fiction World, a magazine from China with a circulation of more than 130,000 as well as publishers like Neil Clarke who have sought out Chinese fiction to publish in translation.

Ken Liu, who has won multiple Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, and a World Fantasy Award, has also worked to bring Chinese science fiction to English readers with his translation of Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem and the publication of the anthology Invisible Planets, which offered translations of a dozen short stories by seven Chinese authors. One of the authors included in the book is Ma Boyong, represented by his story “The City of Silence,” which Ken Liu translated into English.

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Vintage Treasures: Frontera by Lewis Shiner

Vintage Treasures: Frontera by Lewis Shiner

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Frontera (Baen Books, August 1984). Cover by Vincent Di Fate

I first discovered Lewis Shiner in Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies, where he was a regular, and one of my favorite contributors. His first published story, “Tinker’s Damn,” appeared in the fifth issue of Charles Ryan’s Galileo magazine in October 1977, and he followed that with dozens more all through the 80s and 90s in places likes The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Twilight Zone Magazine, Omni, and especially Asimov’s Science Fiction.

His first novel Frontera, the tale of a high-risk expedition to a supposedly abandoned Martian colony, was published as a paperback original in what we used to call the Year of Big Brother, 1984 (that’s a George Orwell reference, for all you young folks). It was nominated for both the Philip K. Dick Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and was followed by perhaps his most famous novel, Deserted Cities of the Heart (1988), which garnered another Nebula nom.

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A to Z Reviews: “The Butcher of Darkside Hover,” by Jonathan Sean Lyster

A to Z Reviews: “The Butcher of Darkside Hover,” by Jonathan Sean Lyster

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A to Z Reviews

Jonathan Sean Lyster only has two published stories, the first appeared in 2020 and the second, “The Butcher of Darkside Hover,” appeared in the  October 2022 issue of Analog. There is a strong resonance between “The Butcher of Darkside Hover” and the classic story “The Cold Equations,”  by Tom Godwin.

The story is set on a base located on the farside of the moon, although as the story progresses, it becomes clear that it is actually in orbit over the farside of the moon, which is one of the issues with the story. Lyster slowly provides details of his world, but never fully and in a manner that means the reader is putting together the pieces to get an idea of what his world looks like. The process means that the reader’s perception is constantly changing regarding the setting when it should be more focused on the problem presented for the characters and their solution.

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Worthy of His Hire: The Day’s Work by Rudyard Kipling

Worthy of His Hire: The Day’s Work by Rudyard Kipling

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The Day’s Work (Penguin Classics, October 4, 1988)

I spent most of my childhood and adolescence in a house with large built-in bookshelves, occupied by books passed on from my grandmother. Among the ones I read were multiple volumes by Kipling. One of the more memorable was The Day’s Work, which I recently added to my shelves of print fiction and which I’ve just reread: a collection of stories nearly all written during Kipling’s period of residence in Vermont, during the early 1890s.

A long time ago, I ran across a comment by some critic that if you wanted to read a conversation between a god, an animal, and a machine, Kipling would be the perfect choice to write it. The Day’s Work might be taken as evidence to support this; it doesn’t bring the three together, but it has one story with a conversation among gods, “The Bridge-Builders”; two with conversations among horses, “A Walking Delegate” and “The Maltese Cat”; and two with conversations among machines, “The Ship That Found Herself” and “.007,” the latter being about a locomotive newly put into service. Those five stories, out of a total of twelve, give the collection a strong feeling of fantasy, which must have been part of what appealed to me when I was in elementary school.

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Vintage Treasures: Tangled Webs by Steve Mudd

Vintage Treasures: Tangled Webs by Steve Mudd

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Tangled Webs (Questar/Popular Library, August 1989). Cover by Blas Gallego

There was a time, not so many years ago, when my reading was spontaneous. My wife would mention an intriguing mystery she’d just finished, I’d pick it up for a minute, and the next thing you know I’ve spent two hours with my feet up on the washing machine. I could get lost in a book in a bookstore. I would miss stops on the bus. Once I was listening to the audiobook  of John Grisham’s The Pelican Brief during a nighttime road trip to Canada, and by the time that damn tape ended I’d missed the turnoff for Detroit by about two hours and was deep in northern Michigan. I still smell pines trees whenever anyone mentions pelicans. True story.

Anyway, the sad truth is these days my reading is by necessity much more planned. I have commitments that will take many months — to publishers, authors seeking cover blurbs, and writers looking for manuscript feedback. On top of that, there are new releases I dearly want to read, and only so many hours in the day.

I can’t let myself get distracted by the many tantalizing old books that pass through my hands. Even when they have cyborg assassins right there on the first page, like Steve Mudd’s forgotten 80s paperback Tangled Webs.
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A to Z Reviews: Sync, by K.P. Kyle

A to Z Reviews: Sync, by K.P. Kyle

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A to Z Reviews

K.P. Kyle’s debut novel Sync is the first of three novel-length works that I’ll be looking at in this series. Published by Allium Press, in 2019, Kyle offers the story of Brigid, who picks up a hitchhiker on a cold, rainy night in New England and she drives home to Boston. Although Jason doesn’t smell very good and seems to be suffering from paranoia, Brigid invites him to spend the night at her apartment so he can get cleaned up and get a good night’s sleep before getting on a train for somewhere.

When a burglar breaks into Brigid’s home that evening, she and Jason go on the lam, trying to avoid the men who apparently actually are after Jason. Jason also reveals his secret to Brigid. He was part of an experiment that allows him to temporarily jump from one reality to another, although the process leaves him naked.

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Vintage Treasures: Cave of Stars by George Zebrowski

Vintage Treasures: Cave of Stars by George Zebrowski

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Cave of Stars (Eos/HarperCollins, December 2000). Cover art by Bob Eggleton

I don’t know much about George Zebrowski.

I probably should. According to ISFDB he’s written more than a dozen science fiction novels, including the John W. Campbell Award-winner Brute Orbits (1999). He’s edited over a dozen anthologies, including four Synergy volumes and three Nebula Awards collections, and was the editor of The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1970-74, and again from 1983-90. With his domestic partner Pamela Sargent he’s produced four Star Trek novels, and all on his own he published four collections of short fiction. That’s a pretty impressive career no matter how you slice it.

But I’ve never read any of his fiction, so when his 1999 novel Cave of Stars showed up in a small paperback collection I bought on eBay last year, I was very intrigued.

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