The Timeless Strangeness of “Scanners Live in Vain”

The Timeless Strangeness of “Scanners Live in Vain”

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Fantasy Book No. 6, January 1950, first appearance of
“Scanners Live in Vain” by Cordwainer Smith. Cover by Jack Gaughan

I recently had occasion to reread Cordwainer Smith’s Science Fiction Hall of Fame story “Scanners Live in Vain.” This was probably my fifth rereading over the years (soon followed by a sixth!) — it’s a story I’ve always loved, but for some reason this time through it struck me even more strongly. It is a truly great SF story; and I want to take a close look at what makes it work.

In this series I often discuss the background details of a story’s publication history, and of its author, first — and these are especially interesting in the case of this story; but I don’t want to bury the lede either. So I’ll discuss the story first, and then go over the history of its publication, and its author’s career. As ever in these essays, the discussion will be rife with spoilers.

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Future Treasures: Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson

Future Treasures: Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson

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Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson (Tor.com, June 28, 202)

Eddie Robson is the author of Hearts of Oak, which we discussed enthusiastically here back in October 2020. His latest, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, is a locked room mystery featuring a murdered alien, his occasional ghost, and an alien language that leaves humans drunk.

Linda Codega at Gizmodo calls the book “a darkly tongue-in-cheek comedy,” and Publishers Weekly proclaims it “a memorable exploration of the power of language and technology in a post first-contact world… thoughtful, fast-paced sci-fi.” This is clearly a book that refuses to settle peacefully into a single category, and it’s all the more interesting for it.

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Goth Chick News: What We Do in the Shadows, Season 4 Plus Baby Colin Robinson

Goth Chick News: What We Do in the Shadows, Season 4 Plus Baby Colin Robinson

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I feel that a sense of humor, however dark, is an essential coping mechanism. Not having one would require we avoid the Web as well as news of any kind, leaving us in social isolation, streaming nothing but MeTV.

Thankfully that is not the case for me, though the term “graveyard humor” seems to get floated a lot in my presence. It is true that I have been known to laugh at inappropriate times or find humor in things that utterly mortify my parents. And if this describes you as well, then I can only assume you have, like me, been counting down the days to the next season of What We Do in the Shadows.

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Random Reviews: “Wizard’s Bounty” by Charles de Lint

Random Reviews: “Wizard’s Bounty” by Charles de Lint

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Cover by Gene Day
Cover by Gene Day

“Wizard’s Bounty” is an early short story by Charles de Lint, first published in 1979 in Dark Fantasy magazine and only reprinted in de Lint’s collection A Handful of Coppers. As such an early appearance, it does not have the feel of much of de Lint’s work as he was clearly trying to find his voice when the story was written, which certainly does not mean that it isn’t a story worth reading.

de Lint has published a handful of stories surrounding the character Aynber, of which “Wizard’s Bounty” was the second. In this story, which would not have been out of place if it appeared in TSR’s The Dragon magazine of the same era, sets Aynber as a bounty hunter nicknamed “The Huntress” who is after the wizard Nemenor, who has a 5,000 gold piece bounty on his head. A chance encounter at a tavern with Boadar, who claims to know where she can find Nemenor, gives Aynber an unwelcome companion who can lead her to the wizard at the cost of part of the bounty.

Against her better judgement, Aynber accepts Boadar’s company and knowledge on her quest and he does lead her to the wizard’s tower. As a companion, Boadar proves useless when they are attacked. Furthermore, during their journey, Boadar takes liberties with her body when she sleeps, which seems gratuitous, but serves to reinforce Aynber’s own judgment of Boadar for the reader, even if she is unaware of Boadar’s action. …

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Forgotten Fantasies

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Forgotten Fantasies

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Hercules in the Haunted World (Italy, 1961)

During the late Fifties and early Sixties, if you were a fan of films of imagination and the fantastic, though there were plenty of monster movies playing at the drive-in, except for the films of Ray Harryhausen there were very few classical fantasies coming out of Hollywood — and Harryhausen’s movies were mostly British productions. In fact, heroic fantasy films were thin on the ground, being regarded in America as fodder for children. Fortunately, that wasn’t always the case in Europe, where monsters still found themselves opposed by sword-swinging heroes as often as by modern soldiers with bazookas. And occasionally, those films would make it across the Atlantic, though they were usually relegated to double bills with fare such as Reptilicus and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

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New Treasures: Sweep of Stars by Maurice Broaddus

New Treasures: Sweep of Stars by Maurice Broaddus

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Sweep of Stars (Tor Books, March 29, 2022). Cover art by Connor Sheehan

Maurice Broaddus is the author of the The Knights of Breton Court trilogy from Angry Robot, the acclaimed Tor.com novella Buffalo Soldier, and now Sweep of Stars, which James Rollins calls the “opening gambit in a great saga… epic,” and which Publishers Weekly labels a “Powerful, sweeping Afrofuturist space opera … A hugely ambitious and notable work of postcolonial science fiction.” If you’re in the market for a fresh and original space opera, this might be just what you’re looking for.

Sweep of Stars is the first novel of the Astra Black trilogy, and it introduces Muungano, a society of space-faring pan-African people who fled oppression on Earth and have now spread across the solar system. It is 2121, and unknown forces are working against Muungano, forcing its ruling families to make hard choices. Meanwhile, thousands of light years away, Muungano soldiers find themselves in the middle of an alien firefight, and faced with tough decisions of their own.

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All My Robert E. Howard Essays (April 2023)

All My Robert E. Howard Essays (April 2023)

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I am the in-house mystery guy (that’s how I hoodwinked John O’Neill into giving me a weekly column). Eight years later, he’s still trying to configure the Fire Wall to keep me from getting up my Monday morning post! I organized the Discovering Robert E. Howard, and Hither Came Conan series’ here at Black Gate. And contributed, of course. That’s the advantage of being in charge of them!

Robert E. Howard is my second-favorite writer (trailing only the terrific John D. MacDonald), and I’ve written quite a bit about him here at Black Gate. With more to come, of course. I’ve got part of a series written, in which I’ll look at the first dozen of Roy Thomas’ Conan the Barbarian comics; including how the series came about. And I’m pretty sure Solomon Kane will succeed Hither Came Conan in the all star contributor series.

I came late to Howard. I have loved mythology since grade school. The Iliad remains one of my all-time favorite stories, and I have a copy of Schleimann’s Ilios. That led me to Dungeons and Dragons in Middle School, and I know I was reading The Lord of the Rings somewhere around the 8th grade. I was a fantasy fan for life.

I bought the first Ace Conan paperback, but it sat on my shelf, unread. Not sure why. I know I read David C. Smith’s Oron, but not that one. As my son was playing with the Thomas the Train layout in the kids section of Barnes and Noble one day, I started reading the first Dely Rey Conan book. I read that the next time we were there. And I bought it. And Robert E. Howard would move up the ranks of my favorite writers, as I bought more Del Reys. Conan still holds the top REH spot, followed by El Borak, and then Solomon Kane. But I just continued to like Robert E. Howard, more and more.

I’m off to my first-ever Howard Days in a few days! It’s gonna be great!!  Here are all of my own Robert E. Howard-related essays here at Black Gate. A couple are pretty good, I think. Mostly in the first two sections below. Check out a couple, please. By Crom!

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The Fantastic Novels of Harlan Ellison

The Fantastic Novels of Harlan Ellison

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Harlan Ellison speaking to the audience at the Los Angeles
Science Fantasy Society, May 1982. Photo by Pip R. Lagenta

Harlan Ellison published three novels early in his career, and spent the rest of his life trying to complete another1. Despite a large and successful body of work, and the willingness of publishers to pay large advances for a novel, he never succeeded.

Returning to the novel form was important for Ellison; he announced the titles of works in progress as “forthcoming” in the front matter of his short story collections, ghost titles that would appear in successive volumes, sometimes for years, then vanish to be replaced by new ones. In 2010, when he was 76 and announced he was dying, Ellison said that he was working on a new novel, The Man Who Looked for Sweetness;2 and in 2014, shortly before he suffered the stroke that ended his writing, he returned to an earlier project.3 Completing another novel was a dream he never relinquished.

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Vintage Treasures: The Hugo Winners, Volumes 1, 2 and 3, edited by Isaac Asimov

Vintage Treasures: The Hugo Winners, Volumes 1, 2 and 3, edited by Isaac Asimov

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The Hugo Winners, Volumes I & II and The Hugo Winners, Volume 3 (Doubleday, 1972 and 1977).
Cover designs by F. & J. Silversmiths, Inc, and Robert Jay Silverman

I’ve written 1,973 Vintage Treasures articles for Black Gate. (That seems like a lot. Is it a lot? If it were, the paperbacks waiting to be written up wouldn’t be threatening to topple over in a spine-crushing avalanche, right? Still seems like a lot, somehow.) My Vintage Treasures pieces aren’t reviews, sometimes because it’s been so long since I’ve read the book in question that I don’t trust myself to do it justice — and sometimes because I haven’t read it at all.

But mostly because I know from experience it takes me forever to assemble a decently thoughtful piece on a book I really enjoyed (or really didn’t enjoy — that takes even longer). In the time it takes me to produce a review I’m happy with, I can write four or five chatty Vintage Treasures, and that seems like a fair trade.

I’m going to break with that tradition here to offer up at least a partial review of The Hugo Winners, the groundbreaking 1962 anthology edited by Isaac Asimov, and its two follow-up volumes, The Hugo Winners, Volume II (1971) and Volume III (1977), all published in hardcover by Doubleday. They are perhaps the most important SF anthologies ever published, and I’ve read them so many times I’m pretty sure I can talk about them entirely from memory.

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Goth Chick News: Way More Fun Than the Jubilee, Draculas Gathered to Celebrate Stoker

Goth Chick News: Way More Fun Than the Jubilee, Draculas Gathered to Celebrate Stoker

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As you have probably heard by now, Queen Elizabeth II is marking 70 years on the throne of England with her Platinum Jubilee Celebration, set to kick off across the UK today, on the anniversary of her coronation in 1953. Yes, it is all quite grand that her 96-year-old Majesty is now the third longest reigning monarch in world history. Taking the top spot is Louis XIV from France, who reigned total of 72 years and 110 days, while in second place is Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX) from Thailand who reigned for 70 years and 126 days.

And we’re all really impressed over here in the colonies, I can tell you. Unless of course you consider that Vlad Dracula (ne Tepes) took the throne of Romania (ne Wallachia) in 1448 and has remained in some portion of the collective conscience ever since.

Okay, I might be stretching this connection just a bit, but here’s where it’s going.

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