Hardfought cover by Tony Roberts Cascade Point cover by Tim White
This Tor Double has the distinction of containing two stories which were both nominated for the Hugo for Best Novella in 1984. Zahn beat out Bear for the rocket, as well as works by Hilbert Schenk, Joseph H. Delaney, and David R. Palmer. Bear wouldn’t go away empty-handed, however, since his story “Blood Music” won the Hugo for Best Novelette that same year (beating out works by Kim Stanley Robinson, George R.R. Martin, Connie Willis, and Ian Watson). Published in November of 1988, the cover for Hardfought was painted by Tony Roberts. The cover for Cascade Point was painted by Tim White.
Cascade Point was originally published in Analog in December, 1983. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novella. The story placed second in the Locus poll and the Analog Readers Poll.
Flashing Swords! #2, 4, & 5 (Science Fiction Book Club, September 1973, May 1977, and December 1981). Covers by Frank Frazetta, Gary Viskupic, and Ron Miller
It’s time to take a look at another Sword & Sorcery anthology series I really love: Flashing Swords, edited by Lin Carter. It is second in my affections only to the Swords Against Darkness 5-book series edited by Andy Offutt that I wrote about here last year.
Flashing Swords! came out of the group known as SAGA, which stood for the Swordsmen and Sorcerers Guild of America, a group in the 1970s and 80s that included almost all the elite S&S writers of the age.
They were an informal group but Lin Carter was the closest thing they had to a leader. Under his editorship, five outstanding anthologies of works from their members appeared, all new stories, not reprints. As shown in the pictures below, I have the volumes from Dell paperbacks, as they were originally released, and three from Nelson Doubleday in hardback (above), as they were offered by the Science Fiction Book Club.
Meeting with Medusa cover by Vincent di Fate Green Mars cover by Vincent di Fate
Tor Double #1 was originally published in October 1988. This volume marked the beginning of the official Tor Double series. The two stories included, Arthur C. Clarke’s Meeting with Medusa and Kim Stanley Robinson’s novella Green Mars complement each other, although by doing so, Green Mars also points out a weakness of Meeting with Medusa. The volume was published as a tête-bêche, with both covers were painted by Vincent di Fate.
Meeting with Medusa was originally published in Playboy in December, 1971. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and Nebula Award, winning the latter, as well as the Seiun Award.
The novella opens with Captain Howard Falcon commanding a massive airship, the Queen Elizabeth IV, over the Grand Canyon. A collision with a drone camera causes the ship to crash, killing nearly everyone on-board, including the uplifted chimpanzees who served as part of their crew. Although horribly injured in the crash, Falcon survived and spends years regaining his ability to function, eventually returning to his job as a pilot with an audacious plan.
The Other Sky cover by Thomas Kidd The House in November cover by Mike Embden
Between October and December of 1969, Keith Laumer’s novella The Seeds of Gonyl were published as a serial in the magazine Worlds of If. The story was published the following year in a hardcover by G.P. Putnam & Sons under the title The House in November, and in 1971 as a paperback by Berkley Medallion.
In 1981, Tor reprinted the novel as part of its “Jim Baen Presents” series, but, apparently deeming the novel too short, it paired it with Laumer’s story “The Further Sky,” which had originally be published in the December 1964 issue of Amazing Stories. That story had also undergone a name change and appeared as “The Other Sky” in various reprints, including its appearance with The House in November.
When Tor Books reprinted the volume in 1985, they included a shield on the cover identifying the book as a “Tor Double.” This book may possibly have been created as a dry run or proof of concept for the eventual Tor Double line. The cover for The Other Sky was provided by Thomas Kidd and the cover for The House in November was provided by Mike Embden, although their credits are reversed on the copyright pages.
Blackmark by Archie Goodwin and Gil Kane (Bantam Books, January 1971). Cover by Gil Kane
As I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t grow up with comics. They weren’t available in my small, rural town of Charleston, Arkansas in the 1960s and 70s. The first store to carry them appeared around ’74 and had a small spinner rack with a dozen or so titles. By then I was already reading regular books and the comics, while they had interesting art, had much less story than books. I bought a few but never got hooked and knew virtually nothing about any comics creator.
As an adult in my fifties, I watched a movie called The Watchmen, which was very good, and I bought the original graphic novel by Alan Moore. I was blown away by the complex storytelling and started buying other graphic novels. I finally started to learn about some of the great comic book creators over the years. I still don’t consider myself a comic book reader but I keep an eye out for items that might interest me. That’s how, in 2019, I found a cool little book called Blackmark, “by Gil Kane.”
An Earthman on Venus (Avon, 1950). Cover by Raymond Johnson
Ralph Milne Farley (1887 – 1963) was a pseudonym for Roger Sherman Hoar. Hoar was a Massachusetts senator and an attorney general, so I can understand his use of a pseudonym to write his SF stories under, but I can’t imagine why he’d choose one just as long and awkward as his real name, and even less memorable.
At any rate, Farley was friends with Edgar Rice Burroughs and wrote his own series of Sword & Planet adventures sometimes called the Radioseries, since most of the books featured the term radio in their titles.
Tau Zero (Millennium/Gollancz SF Masterworks, February 2006). Cover by Dominic Harman
Science fiction — what is it, really? What elements place a story firmly in the genre? For any requirement that you can think of, there is probably a great sf story that violates it, and rather than cobble together some dictionary-ready definition, it’s easier to just think of particular books that you would hand to someone unacquainted with the genre with the words, “Here — read this; this is science fiction!”
Everyone would have their own choices for such a list, of course, and those choices would amount to your de facto definition. For me, some of those books would be Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, and Man Plus by Frederik Pohl, but the very first book on my list would be Poul Anderson’s 1970 novel Tau Zero. Why? What does this book have that makes it a quintessential work of science fiction?
Maybe it’s this — it’s a grand voyage, a brave excursion into the great out there, and it also has a grand perspective shift, like a camera pulling back in a movie, a maneuver that radically alters everything that you had previously thought about the story, something that’s not a minor adjustment, but a move that completely explodes the frame. You think the story is this, but it’s really that, you think you’re here, but you’re really there; the here where you thought you were turns out to be the tiniest corner of there, a there that is larger and stranger and more dizzying than you ever could have originally imagined. (In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Peter Nicholls calls this kind of maneuver a “conceptual breakthrough.”)
Tau Zero begins as a straightforward story of an interstellar voyage, but it ends as far away from that prosaic beginning (prosaic by the standards of science fiction, I mean) as it is possible to imagine. Farther than that, really, and I think that’s the whole point.
Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and the FoundationTrilogy. Robert A. Heinlein’s Sixth Column. Arthur C. Clarke’s first three novels. The entire Conan saga from Robert E. Howard. The International Fantasy Award winner City by Clifford D. Simak. The Hugo Best Novel winner They’d Rather Be Right from Mack Clifton and Frank Riley. Books by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, A. E. van Vogt, C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, Murray Leinster, Frederik Pohl, Jack Williamson, Andre Norton, and James Gunn.
Those would be a solid core of any collection of vintage f&sf. Yet those books and dozens of others appeared in a few years from just one small publisher: Gnome Press.
Of Men and Monsters, by William Tenn
(Ballantine Books, December 1975). Cover by Boris Vallejo
After posting about The Borrowers by British author Mary Norton (1903 -1992) last week, several people mentioned other books and movies with similar kinds of themes — little people living in the houses of big people. I thought I might take another post to discuss a few other examples from my own book collection.
First up is series by American author John Peterson (1924 – 2002). The first one was just called The Littles and was published in 1967, 15 years after The Borrowers (1952). The Littles live much like the “borrowers. They look human except for having tails. (In films they apparently look very mouselike but that’s not the case in the books.)
Dilvish, the Damned (Del Rey, November 1982). Cover by Michael Herring
Roger Zelazny was unquestionably one of the great American fantasists of the 20th century. That’s not to say he was perfect. His woman characters were often 2-dimensional, and he paired an unwillingness to work with an outline (“Trust your demon” was his motto) with a fondness for projects that really needed an outline.
But perfection is boring. Zelazny rarely is. Much of Zelazny’s work is on my always-reread list, anyway. He had a nifty way of putting things, and in describing the Amberseries he brilliantly expressed the kind of fiction I love best and have often tried to write: “philosophic romance, shot through with elements of horror and morbidity.” Philoromhorrmorbpunk. That’s my genre. Or you could just say sword-and-sorcery.
Some people doubt whether Zelazny counts as a sword-and-sorcery writer, but he didn’t doubt it. He described not only the Corwin novels but also big chunks of Lord of Light as sword-and-sorcery. Some people think that a story only counts as S&S if it has a Clonan at its center, but as far as I’m concerned, if you’ve got an outsider hero on a personal mission in a landscape of magical adventure, and there are swords or other edged weapons, you’ve got sword-and-sorcery.
