Random Reviews: “The Birth of A.I.,” by Cynthia Ward

Random Reviews: “The Birth of A.I.,” by Cynthia Ward

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XOddity, May 1998
XOddity, May 1998

Sometimes the roll of the dice produces a story that isn’t really all that easy to discuss. This week’s story, “The Birth of A.I,” is a (very) short humorous story about the birth of artificial intelligence by Cynthia Ward. The story originally appeared in the third issue of Xoddity in 1998.

Ward’s story is quite short, taking up about a page, and it mostly a set up for a punch line, although it doesn’t quite qualify as a shaggy dog story. The story also suffers from the fact that, written in 1998, computing power and the advance of artificial intelligence evolved in a very different manner than the enormous mainframes Ward discusses in her story.

The scientists in Ward’s story have been attempting to create a machine that can pass the Turing test, although the story doesn’t present it in those terms. Essentially they want to make a computer that has the same level of intelligence and sentience as a human being. When the story opens, they are on the verge of succeeding and Dr. Maria Denhurst is pondering what the artificial intelligence will be like and how it will react.

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IMHO: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF SWORD & SORCERY AND HEROIC FANTASY

IMHO: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF SWORD & SORCERY AND HEROIC FANTASY

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Weird Tales featuring “Devil in Iron” by Robert E. Howard, art by Margaret Brundage (~1934); Conan the Conqueror by REH and Lyon Sprague de Camp, art by Frazetta (~1967);  The Road of Kings by Karl Edward Wagner art by Matt Stawicki (1979); Kothar of the Magic Sword by Gardner F. Fox, art by Jeff Jones (~1969)

The Evolving and Cloned Barbarian

Conan, King Kull, Cormac, Bran Mak Morn — names that conjure magic, characters often imitated, but never duplicated. These creations of Robert E. Howard (circa 1930) started the Sword and Sorcery boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. Then there are the barbarian warriors inspired by Howard — “Clonans,” as one writer recently referred to these sword-slinging, muscle-bound characters. A fair observation, but in some cases, not so true.

I prefer to think of these “Clonan” tales of wandering barbarian heroes as “Barbarian Solo” adventures because the majority of these characters are lone wolves, without sidekicks or even recurring companions. This is a big part of their appeal, in fact, and in their own way, they are reminiscent of many cinematic westerns. I’ve read many, if not most, of the early Conan pastiches, including the novels based on Howard’s other creations. Karl Edward Wagner’s, Poul Anderson’s, and Andy Offutt’s portrayals of the Cimmerian come within a sword’s stroke of Howard’s original vision. L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, in commodifying the character, arranged the long, informal saga of Conan in chronological order and, by extenuating these adventures with dozens more, made of Howard’s creation a long-form series similar to the episodic success of a television show on a prolonged run of diminishing returns. For some readers, however, the advantage of this development is that it provided a sort of character arc as Conan grows from a youth to an older man.

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Blob Monsters, Killer Alien Plants, and Feral Automobiles: July/August 2022 Print SF Magazines

Blob Monsters, Killer Alien Plants, and Feral Automobiles: July/August 2022 Print SF Magazines

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July/August 2022 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by Donato Giancola, Eldar Zakirov, and Alan M. Clark

It’s marvelous to see a cover by the great Donato Giancola on Analog, of all places. Donato did one cover for Black Gate, our famous Red Sonja cover for Black Gate 15, our special Warrior Women issue. Analog‘s last cover was by NASA, the inside of a satellite or reactor or Easy Bake oven or something. This one is much cooler.

Shipping problems have delayed the arrival of this month’s F&SF, so I don’t have a copy in my hot little hands in time to do this article (again), but Tangent Online has the Table of Contents, so I can fake it. There’s lots of good reading in this month’s print SF mags, including stories by Jerry Oltion, Sean Monaghan, Bruce McAllister, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Rick Wilber, Will McIntosh, Michael Swanwick, Octavia Cade, Jack McDevitt, Paul Melko, Nick Wolven, James L. Sutter, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and many others. Let’s dive in.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Wally Conger on ‘The Hollywood Troubleshooter Saga’

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Wally Conger on ‘The Hollywood Troubleshooter Saga’

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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)

Wally Conger and I chat on FB about our common interests in books, movies, and TV/streaming shows. We’re even co-Admins on a FB group dedicated to hardboiled/noir, and another one about Solar Pons. He’s also a big fan of the extremely talented James Scott Bell, so I was really happy when Wally agreed to write an essay about that author’s pulp series starring Bill Armbrewster! Take it away, Wally:

Hollywood and hardboiled noir will be forever intertwined. And James Scott Bell, a winner of the International Thriller Writers Award, writing teacher, and creator of at least four entertaining thriller series of books that I can think of (including the delightful Kick-Ass Nun stories), has recently underscored that fact with his ebook Trouble Is My Beat: The Bill Armbrewster, Hollywood Troubleshooter Mystery Novelettes in Classic Pulp Style.

Admittedly, that’s a mouthful of a title, but it’s good marketing. It describes exactly what this gem is. The year is 1945. The war’s just ended, the boys are marching home, and Hollywood is grinding out movies faster than Rita Hayworth is plowing through husbands. Bill Armbrewster is the “troubleshooter” for National-Consolidated Pictures — in other words, he works to keep the studio’s image, and the images of its “people properties,” squeaky clean.

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Vintage Treasures: Tales from the Spaceport Bar edited by George H. Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer

Vintage Treasures: Tales from the Spaceport Bar edited by George H. Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer

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Tales from the Spaceport Bar and Another Round at the Spaceport Bar
(Avon Books, 1987 and 1989). Covers by James Warhola and Doug Beekman

Science fiction has a rep for being serious stuff. Tales of dystopias, climate catastrophes and environmental collapse, dire warnings about worrying trends, that’s SF in a nutshell. Even dressed up in its best story-telling adventure garb, Star Wars or Mad Max-style, it’s still often perceived as all about desperate battles in apocalyptic settings.

Of course, science fiction is much broader and richer than that, and most of its best writers have amply demonstrated their love of whimsy and fun. One of SF’s best-loved sub-genres is the Club Tale/Bar Story, exemplified by Arthur C. Clarke’s famous Tales From the White Hart, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s long-running Gavagan’s Bar stories, Lord Dunsany’s Jorkens tales, Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers mysteries, Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Bar, Larry Niven’s spacefaring tales of Draco Tavern, and many others.

In the late 80s Weird Tales editors George H. Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer assembled a collection of the best such stories, Tales from the Spaceport Bar. It made the Locus Award list of Year’s Best Anthologies (in 11th place), and was quickly followed by Another Round at the Spaceport Bar. Both books are a fine antidote to anyone who’s dabbled just a little too long on the dark side of science fiction.

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The Pandemic Was Really Quite Good to Me

The Pandemic Was Really Quite Good to Me

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Tune in Tomorrow (Solaris, August 23, 2022), and the author

The pandemic was really quite good to me.

Don’t get into a snit – there are caveats: The horrible ongoing forever pandemic was terrible for everybody, including me. Millions had their lives wrecked, or died, and if the “quite good” experience I had could be swapped for a retcon in which “Covfefe” was as close as we ever got to saying “COVID,” I’d do it in a hot second.

Since that isn’t happening, let’s start again.

The pandemic was actually quite good for my debut novel, Tune in Tomorrow. See, back in 2020 I received an email from my agent saying that a publisher was interested in publishing the book, with a few alterations. Was I game?

As someone who struggled for decades to get a damn novel published, the answer was a quick, “Hell yes!”

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Carving Out Destiny: Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock

Carving Out Destiny: Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock

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There came a time when the destiny of Men and Gods was hammered out upon the forge of Fate, when monstrous wars were brewed and mighty deeds were designed. And there rose up in this time, which was called the Age of the Young Kingdoms, heroes. Greatest of these heroes was a doom-driven adventurer who bore a crooning runeblade that he loathed.
His name was Elric of Melniboné…

from the Prologue to Stormbringer

⇐ That cover, more than any other, depicts the absolute coolness of swords & sorcery and what I like about it. Michael Whelan’s painting for the 1977 DAW edition of Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer (1965) is the first time in over two hundred essays I haven’t put the first edition cover first. You can talk about heroism, barbarism vs. civilization and whatnot until the end of the day but, ultimately, this is what I dig. That depiction of Elric, runeblade held high, Horn of Fate trailing behind him, under the storm-wracked heavens, says more about what brings me back to the genre than any book-long disquisition ever could. It’s just so stinking cool. Its appeal is purely and mind-blowingly visceral.

When I was in my mid-teens, all my friends and I devoured these books relentlessly. As soon as one of us finished one series we plunged right into the next. The gradual realization that all of Moorcock’s S&S stories were linked in some crazy pattern made our reading even more compulsive. Many, many elements in his books wound up in roleplaying sessions. I ended at least one universe in a very Moorcockian style.

I did a quick count of how many Moorcock books I’ve read and got over thirty. Some of them, particularly the assorted Eternal Champion books (Elric, Dorian Hawkmoon, Corum, etc.), I’ve read numerous times. I’ve probably read all six Corum novels five or six times. I have definitely not reread any other S&S books, neither Robert E. Howard’s nor Karl Edward Wagner’s, anywhere near that number of times. Moorcock’s books have done more than any other’s to build the framework of what S&S writing is for me if by no other measure than number of pages read. There’s more creativity when it comes to characters and world-building in almost any of his slim DAW yellow-spine books than nearly any monstrous tome I’ve bludgeoned my way through.

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Goth Chick News: Get Ready Vampire Fans, this is Our Year

Goth Chick News: Get Ready Vampire Fans, this is Our Year

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It might be due to this being the 125th anniversary of Dracula, written by Bram Stoker and published in 1897. Or, it could be because it has taken 10 years to fully cleanse our collective pallets of emo, flannel-wearing vampires following the movie version of Stephanie Meyers’ Breaking Dawn (Part 2) hitting theaters in 2012. Whatever the reason, the second half of 2022 is about to play host to a plethora of traditional vampire entertainment; meaning if you’re a fan of vampires actually doing vampy things like sucking blood and dressing well, then readers – this is our year.

Below are the three offerings I’m most excited about. This would also have included a theatrical remake of Salem’s Lot had production delays not bumped it to April 2023. Still I’m quivering beneath my bodice and the thought of all the vampire goodness we have to look forward to.

Check it.

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Random Reviews: “The Box” by Bruce Coville

Random Reviews: “The Box” by Bruce Coville

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Cover by David Palladini
Cover by David Palladini

Because I’ve been asked about the process by which I’ve been selecting stories for the Random Review series, I thought I’d take a moment to explain how the stories are selected.

I have a database of approximately 42,000 short stories that I own sorted by story title. When it comes time for me to select a story to review as part of this series, I roll several dice (mostly ten sided) to determine which story should be read. I cross reference the numbers that come up on the die with the database to see what story I’ll be reviewing.  This week, I rolled 4,023 which turned out to be Bruce Coville’s short story “The Box.”

One of the things I’m hoping to get out of this series, from a personal point of view, is to discover authors and short stories that I’ve owned and have never read. Of course, I’m also hoping to share those discoveries, good or bad, with the readers of Black Gate.

“The Box” refers to a gift an angel has given to Michael when he was a young boy. The box wasn’t a gift, but rather a duty, for Michael was told to take good care of the box until the angel returned to retrieve it. Holding onto the box shaped his life from the time he received it through school, dating, work, and into old age.

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New Treasures: World Breakers edited by Tony Daniel and Christopher Ruocchio

New Treasures: World Breakers edited by Tony Daniel and Christopher Ruocchio

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World Breakers (Baen mass market reprint, July 26, 2022). Cover by Dominic Harman

If you’re one of the (very few) folks who pay attention when I complain, you know that I frequently lament the decline of the mass market science fiction anthology. Book store shelves used to be full of ’em, and nowadays they’ve all but vanished. Folks don’t have an appetite for short fiction these days, at least not in the way they used to. And that’s a shame — anthologies are a great way to discover new writers, fil the time when you can’t commit to a longer work, and just read some great stories.

Tony Daniel and Christopher Ruocchio previously edited Star Destroyers (2018) for Baen, and with Baen senior editor Hank Davis, Ruocchio has produced nearly half a dozen others, including Space Pioneers (2018), Sword & Planet (2021), and Time Troopers (2022). Last year Daniel and Ruocchio released World Breakers, a collection of original stories of super tanks, and what did I find in my local bookstore last week but a handsome and affordable mass market edition. Civilization isn’t dead after all.

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