What I’ve Been Reading: April 2025

What I’ve Been Reading: April 2025

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I continue to listen to audiobooks daily. They fit my lifestyle and let me get to a lot more stuff than I would if I just read. I mean, driving with a paperback in hand is quite the challenge!

I just re-listened to the entire SPQR mystery series by John Maddox Roberts (who I have written about several times, including here). No way I could have sat down and re-read all thirteen.

And I plodded through listening to all 44 hours of Toll of the Hounds, the eighth book of Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen. It was the first book in the series I didn’t really care for – possibly because I don’t like the narrator. But I’ve had a paperback copy on the shelves for ten years, I think. At least I worked in listening to it. I have the audiobook for Dust of Dreams, which is just as long. But the same guy read the whole series, and I don’t want another 40+ hours of him.

But, I do like to still read a physical copy. So, let’s get to what I’ve been checking out on the printed page.

 

FLYING FREEBOOTERS – Frederick Nebel

Nebel’s is the second face on my Hardboiled Mt. Rushmore (Hammett on one side, Norbert Davis on the other). I’m not into the Aviation Pulps, but I am a fan of Nebel’s Gales & McGill action stories. I added several of Nebel’s Pulp Collections from the Black Dog Books table at Windy City. This included some of his other aviation stories. And I’m becoming more of a fan. Flying Freebooters contains three stories. “Isle of Lost Wings” and “Flying Freebooters first appeared in Wings magazine, in 1930.

Nebel used two organizations for many of his aviation stories. Garrison Airways is a flying service (passengers, mail, and freight) in the Far East. Feisty little Sam Garrison is founder and boss, with hardboiled pilots working for him. I’ve read a couple Garrison stories.

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Shai Dorsai: Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson

Shai Dorsai: Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson

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Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson (Ace Books, February 1980). Cover by Jordi Penalva

In 1959, Robert A. Heinlein published Starship Troopers, one of the founding works of military science fiction as a genre. But that same year saw the serialization of Gordon R. Dickson’s Dorsai! in Astounding Science Fiction, a work that may have been equally influential, though it seems now to be less remembered. In fact, both were nominated for the Hugo Award in 1960, though Starship Troopers won.

Dorsai! is set in an interstellar future, with some sixty billion human beings inhabiting 16 planets of eight solar systems. Several of the stars are named in the novel, and as was common at that time, many of them are astrophysically implausible candidates to have biospheres, being of spectral types with relatively short lifespans: Altair (type A7), Fomalhaut (type A4), and Sirius (type A0). Fomalhaut and Sirius are also multiple stars, which limits the possible planetary orbits around them. At least Ceta, orbiting Tau Ceti, is a plausible Earthlike planet! It’s also noteworthy that several of these solar systems have multiple habitable planets — though that’s also true of our own, where Dickson has Mars and Venus humanly colonized, a project that seemed far more daunting only a few years later!

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Tubi Dive, Part III

Tubi Dive, Part III

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Kingdom of the Spiders (Dimension Pictures, November 23, 1977)

50 films that I dug up on Tubi.

Enjoy!

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)

Ah, the 70s. My formative years. Angry nature films were rampant around this time (much to my delight), and now it’s time for tarantulas to be miffed at our overuse of pesticides.

William Shatner plays Rack Hansen (staggeringly good name), a lecherous animal doctor in rural Arizona. When I say lecherous, I mean toward female humans. When Woody Strode finds his prize calf dead, the Shat is called in to figure it out. He calls in an expert from Flagstaff, and unfortunately for the expert, she is hot and blond. Shatner is all over her like tribbles on a starship.

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Tor Doubles: #3 Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree and Robert Silverberg’s Born with the Dead

Tor Doubles: #3 Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree and Robert Silverberg’s Born with the Dead

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Cover for Born with the Dead by Ron Walotsky
Cover for The Saliva Tree by Lee Edwards

Tor Double #3 was originally published in December 1988.  The two stories included are Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree and Robert Silverberg’s Born with the Dead. The volume was published as a tête-bêche, with Les Edwards providing the cover art for The Saliva Tree and Ron Walotsky painting the cover for Born of the Dead.

The Saliva Tree was originally published in F&SF in September, 1965. It won the Nebula Award and was nominated for the Seiun Award.

Set in the mid-1890s, The Saliva tree is the story of Geoffrey Rolles, a young gentleman of leisure in the East Anglian village of Cottersall. His head filled with socialism, he has embarked upon a correspondent with H.G. Wells, one of England’s preeminent socialists of the time. He has also taken an interest in local farmer Joseph Grendon, who has demonstrated his forward thinking ways by installing an electric generator on his farm.

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Goth Chick News: The Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo Breaks Records for Nerdy Goodness

Goth Chick News: The Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo Breaks Records for Nerdy Goodness

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C2E2 mailing insert with our Expo passes

Though Black Gate photog Chris Z and I have affectionately referred to ourselves as “horror nerds” almost from the beginning of working together, I was never quite sure if the term “nerd” was offensive to others. Therefore, in making a small nod to Big Cheese John O’s constant plea to not embarrass him, we only said “nerd” (and “geek” for that matter) in private or in hushed tones.

Then suddenly, either due to the term being liberally employed on the Netflix hit Stranger Things, or because compared to the rest of the world right now “nerds” are downright endearing, being one is akin to being a cool kid. So it’s no surprise that I absolutely loved the mailing insert that accompanied our Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo passes this year.

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The Eccentric’s Bookshelf: Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film

The Eccentric’s Bookshelf: Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film

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1983? Let me tell you how it was.

In a World Without the Internet, before Youtube, before Netflix, before Prime, before 4K UHD smart TVs, before social media or Substack or niche newsletters, before IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, before DVDs and Blu-rays, even before blogs (gasp!), you would find yourself sitting around late at night, channel surfing, listlessly flipping through TV Guide, restlessly looking for something to watch, and you would come across a movie like The Horror of Party Beach and you would think, “What the hell? Is this worth ninety minutes of my life?” And since you would likely have only once chance to see the thing, it was a decision fraught with import. (I’ve always wanted to use that phrase.)

In the absence of all of the resources and options we now take for granted, how did you decide what to do? I’ll tell you what I did — I reached for The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.

The brainchild of Uber-Geek Michael Weldon and an offshoot of his Psychotronic Video magazine, the book is, according to the back cover, “The complete viewer’s guide to the weirdest movies of all time!” It’s a boast that the volume makes good on with one pseudopod tied behind its back.

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A Boy and His Dog: How Archaeology is My Biggest Inspiration

A Boy and His Dog: How Archaeology is My Biggest Inspiration

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Image by Siggy Nowak from Pixabay. This looks like a Stargate. Where’s the dial?

Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

Once upon a time, a much younger me fell into an obsession… Well, several related obsessions, if I’m being honest. Prehistoric Anthropology and Archaeology dug its claws into my brain and would not let go. In what might have been a profound waste of money, I followed that obsession into university, acquiring a Bachelor’s Honours Degree in the subject, with a focus on Celtic Studies. I wrote a thesis that was four times as long as it needed to be (with permission). I wrote on the Continuity of Religious Iconography From the Upper Palaeolithic to the Pre-Roman Iron Age of the Atlantic Façade. Which is to say, basically, some religious beliefs and practices of the Iron Age Celts might just have had their origin in the pre-Celtic peoples of the Stone Age. That’s a lot to cover in just twenty pages, so I handed in eighty-three.

When I say I was/am obsessed, I absolutely meant it.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: William Patrick Murray – Who was N.V. Romero?

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: William Patrick Murray – Who was N.V. Romero?

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

Will Murray has graced this column multiple times, and he has delved into a mystery or two. He’s got another one today, looking into a Pulp byline from the nineteen thirties that has gnawed away at him. And by golly, Will finally had enough! Read on…

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For literally decades, I’ve been intrigued and baffled by the cryptic byline N. V. Romero, which was emblazoned on the front cover of the March, 1937 Star Detective Magazine.

I don’t remember where or when I picked up that old Red Circle pulp magazine. Probably at a collector’s convention somewhere in the 1970s or 80s. It grabbed my attention because the cover-featured lead novel bore the intriguing title,
“The X-Man.”

That’s a coinage I did not think existed prior to Marvel Comics releasing X-Men #1 in 1963. So I grabbed it. I probably paid about five bucks. It was in reasonably good condition. And it was published by Martin Goodman, who later launched Marvel Comics.

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Damien Broderick, April 22, 1944 – April 19, 2025

Damien Broderick, April 22, 1944 – April 19, 2025

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Damien Broderick

Australian writer, editor, and critic Damien Broderick has died, April 19, 2025, just a few days short of his 81st birthday. He died peacefully in his sleep after a long illness. He is survived by his wife and occasional collaborator Barbara Lamar.

I had known Damien quite well online for decades, including interactions in newsgroups and on mailing lists as well as personal correspondence. We met only once, at the World Fantasy Convention in 2017, in San Antonio, TX, where Damien lived at that time; and we had a nice if brief conversation. Damien was showing signs of physical frailty at the time but was still mentally sharp. I had the honor of writing the foreword to his 2012 collection Adrift in the Noösphere, and to reprint a couple of his excellent short stories.

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Tubi Dive, Part II

Tubi Dive, Part II

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The Dunwich Horror (American International Pictures, January 14, 1970)

50 films that I dug up on Tubi.

Enjoy!

The Dunwich Horror (1970)

Yes, I can hear some of you clutching at your pearls as I write this, but barring a couple of clips here and there, I had never actually seen this one before.

As Lovecraft adaptations go, I guess you could say this is one of the most faithful, what with familiar names and places and ‘Yog-Sothoth’ being yelled approximately 300 times, but it is a far cry from the original source material.

Corman must have read the description of Wilbur Whateley (“goatish”) and interpreted that as ‘horny,’ because this version of WW just wants one thing, and that’s Sanda Dee naked on a sacrificial shagging stone. This is Dee’s first ‘mature’ film, and I wasn’t impressed — she’s a bit bland in this, however, Dean Stockwell as Wilbur is amazing. Now there is an actor who is FULLY committed.

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