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Vintage Treasures: Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley

Vintage Treasures: Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley

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Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley. Cover by Bruce Jensen

Paul J. McAuley was one of our earliest contributors, with a book review column in the very first issue of Black Gate magazine. His writing career was taking off at the same time — his debut novel Four Hundred Billion Stars won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1988, and Kirkus Reviews raved about his 1995 novel Red Dust, calling it “An extraordinary saga… Superb.”

But his breakout book was Fairyland, an early nanotech novel set in a ruined Europe where bioengineered dolls are used as disposable slaves. It won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel, and was eventually reissued as part of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series. In his SF Site review Matthew Cheney wrote:

Fairyland was first published in 1995; it dazzles still. Though some of the props of its future have been churned into clichés by many subsequent novels and movies, few of those props have gathered dust in the intervening years… even more remarkable is that, at least for its first two thirds, the novel succeeds as much on the strengths of its structure, characters, and themes as it does on its whizz-bangs and gosh-wows…

The basic plot is a simple thriller-quest: a man goes in search of a woman who bewitched him with something he considers love (though it might be the residual effect of being sprayed with nanobots)… Along the way, McAuley gives us a vision of EuroDisney that is as disturbing as the visions of its American counterparts in Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom and Carl Hiaasen’s Native Tongue. The chapters set here are among the most compelling and vivid in the book, a posthuman primordial ooze fueled by excesses of capital and biology in the ruins of a labyrinth built by corporate “Imagineers”….

It is a story propelled at its best moments by ideas, and yet it doesn’t neglect to present characters who are, more often than not, individual and unpredictable, and so it helps break down the supposed barriers between the novel of ideas and the novel of psychology in the same way that it breaks down the more intractable barriers between hard science fiction and high fantasy.

Fairyland was published in the UK by Gollancz in 1995, and reprinted in mass market paperback in the US by Avon in July 1997. The Avon paperback is 420 pages, priced at $5.99. The cover is by Bruce Jensen.

See all our recent Vintage Treasures here.

Vintage Treasures: Fungi From Yuggoth & Other Poems by H.P. Lovecraft

Vintage Treasures: Fungi From Yuggoth & Other Poems by H.P. Lovecraft

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Fungi From Yuggoth & Other Poems (Ballantine, 1971). Cover by Gervasio Gallardo

I’m a little embarrassed to admit I haven’t read much Lovecraft poetry. Well, I read his marvelous “Drinking Song,” from his first published story “The Tomb,” which reads exactly like the ballads belted out by drunken revelers in every Scottish tavern I’ve ever been in. Here’s the first stanza.

Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale,
And drink to the present before it shall fail;
Pile each on your platter a mountain of beef,
For ’tis eating and drinking that bring us relief:
        So fill up your glass,
        For life will soon pass;
When you’re dead ye’ll ne’er drink to your king or your lass!

Read the whole thing at the link above.

Lovecraft didn’t get much respect as a poet until long after his first fiction collection, The Outsider and Others, appeared in 1939. His Collected Poems was first published by Arkham House in a tiny print run in 1963, and then retitled Fungi From Yuggoth & Other Poems for its Ballantine paperback reprint eight years later.

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A Fine Addition to any SF Library: Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh

A Fine Addition to any SF Library: Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh

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Tin Stars (Signet, 1986), volume 5 of Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction. Cover by JAV

Isaac Asimov published more than 500 books in his lifetime. Now Asimov was amazingly productive — averaging around 1,700 words published per day over the last two decades of his life — but no one is that prolific. In later years he became a proficient book packager, working with editors like Charles G. Waugh and especially Martin H. Greenberg to churn out dozens and dozens of science fiction anthologies in which he contributed little more than an introduction and perhaps some editorial guidance.

If this sounds dismissive, oh my friends, it is not meant to be. Asimov was interested in a great many things, but one of his earliest and most enduring passions was short fiction. It was his love for early science fiction pulps that set him firmly on the path towards being a successful SF writer by his later teens, and in his later years he became one of the staunchest champions of the science fiction short story — and in particular those stories and authors that, by the 70s and 80s, were in growing danger of being forgotten. Between 1979 and his death in 1992 he put his name (and the considerable selling power behind it) on numerous SF anthologies and long-running anthology series edited with Greenberg and Waugh, including The Great SF Stories (25 volumes, 1979-92), The Mammoth Book series (6 books, 1988-93), Isaac Asimov’s Magical Worlds of Fantasy (12 books, 1983-91), and others. I don’t know if it was ever made explicit, but it seemed pretty clear that Waugh made the selections, Greenberg handled the rights paperwork, and Asimov was sort of a godfather over the whole process. In any case, the success of these books helped inspire other reprint anthologies, and for many decades life was good for classic science fiction lovers.

Those days, of course, are long over, and mass market reprint genre anthologies are scare as hens teeth today. But when times are tough, the tough get creative, and so I’ve been on the hunt for older science fiction anthologies I may have overlooked all those years ago. That’s how I rediscovered Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction — and it is a delight.

Like many of his other popular series it was edited with Greenberg and Waugh, and included 10 volumes published between 1983-90. Each had a different theme: Intergalactic Empires, Space Shuttles, Monsters, Invasions, and so forth. They were generously sized (300-400 pages) and came packed with wonderful stories selected by an editor with a keen eye. These books have never been reprinted, but they’re not hard to find. In fact I recently bought a set of five in nearly brand new condition for significantly less than original cover price.

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A Tale of Wonder: The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle

A Tale of Wonder: The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle

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When Molly Grue yells at the unicorn, it expresses a little how I felt on reading Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (1968) this past month for the very first time:

First edition

But Molly pushed him aside and went up to the unicorn, scolding her as though she were a strayed milk cow. “Where have you been?” Before the whiteness and the shining horn, Molly shrank to a shrilling beetle, but this time it was the unicorn’s old dark eyes that looked down.

“I am here now,” she said at last.

Molly laughed with her lips flat. “And what good is it to me that you’re here now? Where were you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?” With a flap of her hand she summed herself up: barren face, desert eyes, and yellowing heart. “I wish you had never come, why do you come now?” The tears began to slide down the sides of her nose.

Of course, what Molly learns is that she needn’t have waited for wonder and transcendence to find her, but should instead have sought them. Taking her lesson to heart for myself, I felt betrayed and angry for only a moment before yielding to chagrin that I hadn’t sooner sought this perfectly-cut gem of a story. The book sat on a shelf for twenty years, gathering dust and losing to the sun the richness of color of its wonderful Gervasio Gallardo artwork.

If The Last Unicorn was a lesser book, I could offhandedly describe it as an illustration of the universal need to undertake a quest, to find wonder — whether from beauty or love or something more ineffable. But Beagle has given us so much more. He’s tucked treasures inside prose that echoes with the sounds of hidden woodland glens and that is painted in the colors of lost and recovered dreams; he’s elucidated the value that can be gleaned from loss, sacrifice, regret. And further, he’s told a story about stories, and how they don’t reflect reality, except when they do. He’s played with the various elements of fantasy — the quest, the wizard, the princess, etc. — in a way that loves them as much as it punctures them.

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Vintage Treasures: The Guardsman by P. J. Beese and Todd Cameron Hamilton

Vintage Treasures: The Guardsman by P. J. Beese and Todd Cameron Hamilton

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The Guardsman (Pageant Books, 1988). Cover by Thomas Kidd

The Guardsman is an interesting piece of science fiction history. Well it’s interesting to me, anyway.

It’s the only novel by either of its two co-authors, P. J. Beese and Todd Cameron Hamilton. Beese had a handful of short stories in mid-90s SF anthologies, Hamilton is much better known as an artist, and quite a good one — he painted about two dozen covers in the late 80s and early 90s, including six for John Varley novels and half a dozen very fine Analog covers — such as this splendid piece for the November 1987 issue.

The Guardian would probably be forgotten today (in fact, probably is forgotten), if not for the fact that it was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best novel — a nomination that was quickly withdrawn due to accusations of bloc voting. The controversy that swirled around it as a result tainted both authors and, while I have no direct knowledge, I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that it may be why we saw no additional novels from Beese or Hamilton.

And that’s a shame — especially since, with the benefit of hindsight, it appears that the public shaming that resulted was largely (or perhaps wholly) undeserved. Mike Glyer at File 770 did some fine investigative journalism into what he called the 1989 Hugo Controversy in 2017; here’s a summary of his findings.

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The Odyssey of Guy Davenport

The Odyssey of Guy Davenport

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Inside cover of The Odyssey of Homer by TE Shaw (1945),
showing the wanderings of Odysseus

I bought a book last week from a bookseller on Instagram, the first time I’ve ever done that.  It was a copy of T. E. Shaw’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey.  Yes, that T. E. Shaw, Lawrence of Arabia.

The book is old, beat, and tired. It’s probably a twelfth printing, depending on how you count such things, but what caught my attention was that the seller had included a photo of the previous owner’s signature, Guy Davenport, Jr., and the signature was dated 1945.

Did this copy of the book belong to Guy Davenport, a minor but very interesting science fiction writer who won a MacArthur fellowship in 1990? I bought the book and then started to research.

I’ve found nothing conclusive, but everything points in that direction. Davenport was named after his father Guy Mattison Davenport and was, in fact, a Junior. Davenport would have been 18 years old in 1945, just the right age to read the book in either his first year of college or his last in high school. He taught for 27 years at the University of Kentucky and lived in Kentucky for another 15 years until his death in 2005, so the book turned up in the correct geographical location.

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Vintage Treasures: The Trackers Series by David Gerrold

Vintage Treasures: The Trackers Series by David Gerrold

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Covers by Michael Herring

David Gerrold began his career as a screenwriter for Star Trek (the famous episode “The Trouble With Tribbles”), Land of the Lost, Babylon 5, Sliders, and others, but today he’s chiefly known as an author and novelist, with such works as the Hugo Award winning “The Martian Child” (made into a 2007 John Cusack film), The War Against the Chtorr series, Star Wolf, and most recently Hella, a 2020 adventure thriller set on a world where everything is monstrously huge (“hella big”).

Anyone with a career that rich has a few interesting tales, and one of the more intriguing is the saga of Trackers, the story of a colony planet of human, androids and reptilian hunters that bands together to “strike back against their vampire overlords and bring revolution to the stars.” In 1987, while he was serving as a story editor for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Gerrold left to develop a Trackers mini-series for CBS.

In April I was offered the opportunity [to] write and produce a four-hour science-fiction mini-series for CBS and Columbia Television. The series is called Trackers and the Executive Producer is Daron J. Thomas. If the mini-series is a hit, then a regular weekly SF TV series would be developed from it. This was a very difficult decision for me to make. Star Trek has always been a home to me… [but] now, it was obvious to me that it was time to leave home. Or as my agent put it: “You can’t turn down the chance to be the Great Bird of your own galaxy.”

Trackers was never produced, and instead Gerrold turned it into a two-volume series for Bantam Spectra, Under the Eye of God (1993) and A Covenant of Justice (1994).

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James E. Gunn, July 12, 1923 – December 23, 2020

James E. Gunn, July 12, 1923 – December 23, 2020

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Photo Courtesy of Gunn Center for Science Fiction Studies

 

Sad news for the science fiction and fantasy writing world.  James Edwin Gunn, writer, scholar, teacher and Science Fiction Grandmaster, died of congestive heart failure Wednesday December 23, 2020. 

James Gunn founded the University of Kansas Center for Science Fiction Studies, and from their site Center Director Chris McKitterick wrote:

The Center’s Associate Director, Kij Johnson, and I offer our deepest condolences to everyone who cared about Jim, whose lives he touched – and there were many – and whose careers he influenced, which amounts to almost everyone in our field today, whether they’re aware of his intellectual parentage or not.

McKitterick wrote for Michael Page’s biography (Saving the World Through Science Fiction: James Gunn, Writer, Teacher, and Scholar):

“He has taught so many teachers, scholars, and educators that his reach is immeasurable. Jim’s mentoring has shaped the genre into what we enjoy today, making him one of the most influential figures in SF. His is a life devoted to science fiction, and without him, the field would not be the same, nor the world as aware of both the peril and potential of human endeavor.”

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Vintage Treasures: The Macabre Reader edited by Donald A. Wollheim

Vintage Treasures: The Macabre Reader edited by Donald A. Wollheim

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The Macabre Reader (Ace, 1959). Cover by Ed Emshwiller

Today, December 21st, is the Winter solstice and the longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. What to do with those long winter night hours? Curl up with a blanket, a warm beverage, and a good spooky book, of course.

My pick for tonight is Donald A. Wollheim’s The Macabre Reader, his 14th anthology, published as a paperback original in 1959 and never reprinted in the US. It’s still considered one of his finest anthologies, even today, and has both a fine reputation and the benefit of a good print run — meaning copies are still very inexpensive. There are plenty of reviews out there; here’s an excerpt from one of my favorites, by Dem Bones at Vault of Evil:

Thorp McClusky – “The Crawling Horror”: Hans Brubaker’s farmhouse comes under attack from a colourless jelly which devours rats, cats and cattle before turning [its] attention to human prey. His beautiful young wife Hilda and the local physician Dr. Kurt are the only people who believe his seemingly insane story and help him secure the place versus the shapeless creeping sludge. All is well until eighteen year old Bertha Brandt turns up on the doorstep in the middle of the night…

Zealia Brown Reed – “The Curse Of Yig”: Oklahoma, 1925. An ethnologists’ researches into snake lore amongst the Native Americans leads him to Guthrie Asylum… [and] the tragic history of settlers Walker and Audrey Davis, whose anxieties over her wiping out a nest of baby rattlers culminate in madness, manslaughter and monster births. A pulp classic with a killer ending, reputedly revised by H. P. Lovecraft.

The Macabre Reader contains stories and poems by H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei, Robert Bloch, Henry S. Whitehead, John Martin Leahy, and many others — all under a killer cover by Ed Emshwiller. It’s perfect for a snowbound winter night.

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Vintage Treasures: Threats… and Other Promises by Vernor Vinge

Vintage Treasures: Threats… and Other Promises by Vernor Vinge

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Threats… and Other Promises (Baen, November 1988). Cover by E. M. Gooch

Vernor Vinge is one of our greatest modern science fiction writers. He’s widely credited with introducing the singularity into modern parlance with his 1993 essay “The Coming Technological Singularity.” He’s won the Hugo Award five times, for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky, and Rainbows End, and his novellas “Fast Times at Fairmont High,” and “The Cookie Monster.”

His first short story collection True Names … and Other Dangers appeared in 1987; it was followed quickly by Threats … and Other Promises in 1988. Both were paperback originals from Baen, and both were nominated for the Locus Award for Best Collection. The latter is remember today chiefly for the novella “The Blabber,” the first story in Vinge’s celebrated Zones of Thought universe, setting for much of his most popular fiction. I first learned about it from Alan Brown’s insightful review at Tor.com, here’s the bit that grabbed my attention.

“The Blabber” describes a human colony world settled by emigrants from the American Great Lakes region. Both Earth and this new colony are located in the “Slow Zone,” a region where travel and communications are limited to the speed of light, and superhuman intelligence is impossible. Beneath this region, in the “Unthinking Depths,” even human-level intelligence is impossible… The fringes of the galaxy are the “Beyond,” where the speed of light is no longer a limiting factor, and superhuman beings and intelligences live.

In “The Blabber,” the human colony, located just within the Slow Zone, is visited by a trading expedition from the Beyond, looking to trade advanced technology for cultural artifacts from the humans. The story is a bravura effort, mixing thoughtful scientific extrapolation with wonders that would be right at home in the space opera tales of science fiction’s pulp era. Vinge found a way to escape the bounds of rigid extrapolation, but in a way that was internally consistent. There is a joy and sense of wonder in “The Blabber” that I had not seen in Vinge’s work before. So when I heard that A Fire Upon the Deep would be set in that same universe, I looked forward to it with great anticipation. Anticipation that was rewarded in abundance.

If you’re like me and you like to sample authors with short fiction first, Threats…. and Other Promises is a great place to start. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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