Random Review: “A Conglomeration of Bees” by Kiel Stuart

Random Review: “A Conglomeration of Bees” by Kiel Stuart

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Beyond the Last Star
Beyond the Last Star

Beyond the Last Star was the fifth and final anthology put together on SFF.net, a one-time website that served not only as the webhost to numerous science fiction authors from 1996 until 2017. In addition to webhosting, SFF.net also ran a bulletin board analogous to USENET or the GEnie boards out of which it grew.  The community that existed at SFF.net not only put out a series of anthologies, but also compiled and submitted the infamous Atlanta Nights, as written by Travis Tea, as a sting operation after PublishAmerica stated that “the quality bar for sci-fi and fantasy is a lot lower than for all other fiction.”

Kiel Stuart’s story for the final SFF.net anthology, “A Conglomeration of Bees” has a wonderfully nostalgic feel to it, a story that inhabits the same world as Ray Bradbury’s tales of growing up in “Green Town.” The story is set in a small town that could be anywhere in the United States although Stuart defines it as Sag Harbor, Long Island.

The focus is on Kate Demarest, who sold various random items off the front porch of her house.  Her day started out normally, including a visit to an antiques shop, when she heard rumors or a swarm of bees moving through town in the shape of a man, apparently walking around and emulating tipping its hat. Although Kate hopes to see the bee-man, with a sense of trepidation, she also has her own business to run, no matter how slow it is.

When dealing with a regular customer, Mrs. Sedgwick, who is sure that Kate is hiding the items she is interested in, Kate’s day is enlivened by the appearance of a mandrill, who enters store on Kate’s porch and begins to rummage through the miscellany she is selling. While Mrs. Sedgwick is disturbed by the creature, Kate treats it as any other customer, knowing that there is a bonus in that the mandrill with cause Mrs. Sedgwick to leave.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Boarding Party Bingo

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Boarding Party Bingo

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Captain Horatio Hornblower (USA, 1951)

The Age of Sail lasted almost three millennia until wind power was replaced by steam in the late 1800s — a time that, in the mid-twentieth century, was still within living memory. Swashbuckling sea stories are still with us, but as a subject for big-budget movies, they peaked in the early Fifties. Like Westerns, many of these sea stories followed formula, and while some were great, most were considerably less than that. Let’s look at three cutlass-swinging adventures from 1951-52, two of which are worth watching even seventy years later. Out swords and pistols, me lads, and prepare to board!
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New Treasures: Never the Wind by Francesco Dimitri

New Treasures: Never the Wind by Francesco Dimitri

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Never the Wind (Titan Books, June 2022). Cover design by Julia Lloyd

I first learned about Francesco Dimitri’s new novel Never the Wind when I heard Paul Tremblay describe it as “”Susanna Clarke meets Robert Aikman,” not exactly a description I hear every day. Publishers Weekly calls it “truly spooky…plenty here to fascinate fans of cerebral horror.”

That was more than enough to pique my interest. I set out to learn more and quickly found Dimitri’s guest post at Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog, My Favorite Bit:, where he discusses the narrative use of magic. It certainly cemented my interest — but I also found the way he approached magic on the page fascinating, and enormously useful for anyone using the supernatural in fiction.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Shovel’s Painful Predicament

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Shovel’s Painful Predicament

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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)

I am far more into pastiche – that emulation of an author’s style – than parody, which uses the author’s work to get a laugh. But I do read a little parody; and have written a few short stories in that category. Black Gaters know I am a huge Sherlock Holmes fan. My first column here, which ran weekly for three years, was called The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes (an homage to Sherlockian Vincent Starrett).

And, since you’re reading the 82nd installment of A (Black) Gat in the Hand, you know I love wandering down those Mean Streets. If done well, I think you can mix genres. In this instance – for a little parody fun. William Gillette was THE great stage Sherlock Holmes, having rewritten a first draft of a play by Arthur Conan Doyle himself. Sherlock Holmes – A Drama in Four Acts became an international sensation. Gillette would play the role over 1,300 times on stage, make a film of it, and even, at age 82, record a radio version. It is still performed today, and such notables as Leonard Nimoy, Frank Langella, and Alan Rickman, have performed it on stage. Of course, I wrote about it here at Black Gate.

In 1905, Gillette was to perform a comedy sketch at a charity event. It fell apart at the last minute, and he quickly wrote the curtain-raiser, The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes, which he performed with the great Ethel Barrymore (John’s sister), as a fill-in. He would use it in the future, and it’s a fun spoof of a typical Holmes case.

I decided to rewrite Painful Predicament as a hardboiled parody. And I’m thinking of a follow-up. Shovel himself is a pretty regular PI, and I do use some over-the-top hardboiled prose. But I like the humor the client provides. So, here we go…

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Cemetery Cats and Sinister Catacombs: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series IX, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Cemetery Cats and Sinister Catacombs: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series IX, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

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The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series IX edited by Karl Edward Wagner (DAW 1981). Cover by Michael Whelan

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series IX was the ninth volume in DAW’s Year’s Best Horror Stories, copyrighted and printed in 1981. This was the second volume edited by horror author and editor Karl Edward Wagner (1945–1994). Michael Whelan’s (1950–) artwork appears for a seventh time in a row on the cover. I continue to be very impressed with Whelan’s artistic diversity of subject and mood. Though the scenes depicted almost never have anything to do with the contents, they are highly evocative and truly draw you to the book.

As with Wagner’s previous volume, all of the authors of The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series IX were male. Six were American, four were British. Wagner included four stories from professional magazines, three from books (one collection, two anthologies), and three came from professional fanzines. This volume holds the fewest number of stories we have yet seen for a DAW’s Year’s Best, because more than one of the stories here was close to novella length. We continue to see some returning names: Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, T. E. D. Klein and Harlan Ellison. But there are several first-timers as well.

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A PRELIMINARY LOOK AT DAW BOOKS

A PRELIMINARY LOOK AT DAW BOOKS

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The Rape of the Sun by Ian Wallace (DAW 1982). Preliminary sketch and final cover by David B. Mattingly

As a teenaged science fiction and fantasy fan growing up in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, I loved DAW Books. They had some great authors and great cover art, and all those yellow spines looked sweet next to each other on the bookshelf.

As some of you may know, I collect and sell original SF and fantasy art. I’ve been fortunate enough over the years to acquire a number of those DAW cover paintings that I admired growing up. Recently I was given on consignment one of the cooler items that I’ve sold. This was a sketchbook, compiled by artist David Mattingly, containing 34 preliminaries. Mattingly had glued a preliminary to each right hand page. The sizes of the preliminaries varied, but they generally ranged between roughly 4.25” x 7” to 6” x 8”. There were clearly more pages at some point that had been cut out; presumably these contained other preliminaries that were sold separately over the years. Mattingly had given each preliminary a number; these ran from 62 through 113, in order, with gaps for missing pages.

I’ve always enjoyed seeing preliminaries, as they give a glimpse into the artist’s process as well as, in the case of preliminaries there were rejected, a view of what might have been. Most of the prelims in the sketchbook weren’t for DAW books – there were many for Del Rey/Ballantine Books as well as SF digests – but ten of them were. I thought that fellow DAW enthusiasts might enjoy seeing these earlier cover concepts.

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Goth Chick News: Halloween Ends Is Likely Not the End

Goth Chick News: Halloween Ends Is Likely Not the End

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Last week I dropped a little truth on how box office take determines which movies and movie makers continue to get funded, or not. Using the example of Rob Zombie’s forthcoming The Munsters movie, I laid out the financial equation which allows films such as this to be foisted on an unsuspecting audience, whether the audience wants it or not. Now, keep that in mind while we examine this phenomenon from a different angle.

The very lucrative Halloween franchise, birthed by John Carpenter in 1978, has since had many foster parents, including Rob Zombie who cranked out two Halloween movies of his own in 2007 and 2009. Perhaps it is no coincidence that after those two efforts, death-defying slasher Michael Myers had the longest hiatus of his bloody career, as it would be nine years before anyone took another stab at a Halloween movie.

Enter GCN favorite Jason Blum and Blumhouse Productions. Blumhouse, who has been the driving force behind quite a few horror movie successes, partnered with Malek Akkad, the son of the late Moustapha Akkad, executive producer of the original Halloween franchise. In theory, their goal was to produce a 3-movie bookend to the franchise by bringing back scream queen extraordinaire Jamie Lee Curtis to reprise her role as Laurie Strode, the quintessential “final girl” from five of the prior films. This partnership gave us Halloween (2018) and Halloween Kills (2021), returning 17x and 6.5x profit to operating budget respectively, virtually ensuring Blumhouse would get another $20M to create the final film in his trilogy.

Which brings us to the thirteenth installment of the Halloween film franchise, Halloween Ends, whose first-look trailer was released this week.

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Random Review: “Reborn” by Ken Liu

Random Review: “Reborn” by Ken Liu

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Cover by Richard Anderson
Cover by Richard Anderson

In 2014, David G. Hartwell, at Tor Books, edited to second anthology of stories which were based on a specific painting. He provided a piece of art created by Richard Anderson to multiple authors and asked them to write stories inspired by the art. The first of the three novelettes to appear in The Anderson Project is Ken Liu’s “Reborn.”

The world of “Reborn” is one in which humans are living in an uneasy relationship with the alien Tawnin. The story opens with the arrival of a Tawnin ship, returning some of the Reborn, humans who have been altered by the Tawnin, back to Earth.  A crowd has gathered for the event and Josh Rennon, a policeman working with the Tawnin, as well as one of the Reborn, is on the scene to see if he can spot anyone who is less than happy with the Tawnin’s residence on Earth.  When a bomb explodes, he is able to apprehend someone who appears to be connected with it.

Although the story begins to take on the tone of a police procedural, Liu is interested in following up on several different threads.  Rennon is in a relationship with Kai, one of the Tawnin, and Liu explores what their relationship means, from a physical as well as an emotional and intellectual point of view. In some ways, both Kai and Rennon are new.  As a Reborn, some of Rennon’s memories have been excised from him while the Tawnin take the view that just as their cells are completely replaced every few years, so too are their memories, and so a Tawnin today is a completely different individual than the person thie was a decade earlier.

The procedural potion of the story also continues and Rennon begins to discover that his suspect appears to be part of a larger conspiracy.  As Rennon tracks down the threads that appear during his interrogation of the suspect, he comes across the mysterious Walker Lincoln, who appears to be the key to this particular terrorist cell, even if there doesn’t seem to be a record of Lincoln.  Nevertheless, Rennon insists on following up on any leads, which makes his colleague Claire, as well as Kai, concerned about where the investigation is taking him.

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High Fantasy Romance from New-Minted SF Royalty: A Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows

High Fantasy Romance from New-Minted SF Royalty: A Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows

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A Strange and Stubborn Endurance (Tor, July 26, 2022)

Foz Meadows is conquering the world.

She won a Hugo Award in 2019 (as she puts it, “for yelling on the internet”), and she’s been a widely acclaimed essayist and blogger — at Strange Horizons, The Huffington Post, and Black Gate, among many other fine places — for nearly a decade. Her fantasy novel An Accident of Stars and its sequel A Tyranny of Queens were publishedby Angry Robot in 2016/17, and last year Tor Books announced they’d acquired her massive new fantasy novel, A Strange and Stubborn Endurance.

A Strange and Stubborn Endurance finally arrives next week and, if the early buzz is anything to go by, it’s shaping up to be one of the major fantasy novels of year. Publishers Weekly calls it “lushly drawn fantasy romance… skillfully integrates gripping mystery and satisfying slow-burn romance,” and Library Journal proclaims it ““an emotionally gripping, delightful queer fantasy filled with political intrigue.” But my favorite notice came from SF Chronicle, which heralds Foz as “newly minted royalty of sci-fi fantasy.”

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Interzone Finds a New Publisher

Interzone Finds a New Publisher

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Interzone 292/293. Cover art by Vincent Sammy

Big changes are afoot for Interzone, the leading British SF magazine.

Long time publisher TTA Press has announced that the latest issue, Interzone 292/293, will be its last. The magazine has been sold to MYY Press. The new editor is Gareth Jelley.

The TTA era of Interzone ends with a bang — a big 192-page full color double issue, with new fiction from Rich Larson, Jeff Noon, Alexander Glass, Charles Wilkinson, and many more — plus artwork from Richard Wagner, Vince Haig, Vincent Sammy, and many others, the usual columns and goodies, and a Guest Editorial by Gareth Jelley, in which he outlines his plans and vision for the magazine.

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