It’s Only a Matter of Time

It’s Only a Matter of Time

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The human mind daydreams its way around certain specific topics with exceptional regularity. We fret about personal security, we hope for love (in its innumerable forms), and to round out the likely top three, we focus on death. This last in particular invites a speculative element: we can hardly help fantasizing about an extended or perhaps immortal life span.

But not far down the list comes the earnest desire to travel in time. Backward, forward, sidelong –– “over, under, sideways, down” –– any shift in our current path will do. We want to zip back in time to visit places now impossible to see, or connect with loved ones we’ve lost. We want to zoom forward to get a preview of what is to come.

The urge is powerful, atavistic. It’s as if our very cells, so prone to decay (a driving force of time as we experience it), insist that here lies a field that demands investigation.

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I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie, Part III

I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie, Part III

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Bug Buster (DMG Entertainment, 1998), Mesa of Lost Women (Howco Productions,
1953), and Earth vs. the Spider (American International Pictures, 1958)

Bug Buster – 1998 – Prime

Giant bugs?

Not until the last five minutes, then we get MOTHER BUG (Doug Jones)

CGI heavy?

A couple of unconvincing enhancements, but for the most part, practical and sticky.

Any good?

I started out with a bit of optimism due to the interesting cast including George Takei, James Doohan, Randy Quaid, Meredith Salanger, and a very young Katherine Heigl. Unfortunately, the script was so poor and the direction so pedestrian, that it turned into a bit of a slog.

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A to Z Review: “Basic Agreement,” by Avis Pabel

A to Z Review: “Basic Agreement,” by Avis Pabel

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A to Z Reviews

“Basic Agreement,”  by Avis Pabel appeared in the September 1958 issue of Astounding and was reprinted in the December UK issue of  the magazine. It is the only story by Pabel that appears in the Internet Science Fiction Database, although she wrote articles under the name Avis Brick that appeared in the magazine Persuasion, which was published by the Nathaniel Branden Institute, part of the Objectivist movement championing Ayn Rand.

“Basic Agreement” is an odd little story of Marjorie, who insists she sees something out of the  corner of her eye in her bedroom each night after her parents put her to bed. Her father has little patience with her shenanigans. The fact that Marjorie is unable to describe what she saws just serves to make him less willing to offer her sympathy. Instead, he compares Marjorie to her older sister Jill, who has apparently died and was either a perfect child or whose death has sanctified her in her parents’ memories.

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Goth Chick News: Buckle Up – We’re Going to the Fan Expo

Goth Chick News: Buckle Up – We’re Going to the Fan Expo

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Way back in 2010, Black Gate photog Chris Z suggested we check out the Wizard World Chicago Comic Con. This was by no means a new event in our fair city. In fact, the Chicago Comic Con was first held at the Playboy Towers Hotel (yes, that Playboy) in 1972. Wizard World, original publishers of the famous Wizard Magazine, purchased the event in 1996, giving it nationwide publicity and eventually expanded to host similar events in nearly twenty cities.

By 2011 it was the largest convention of its kind in Chicago, and though it wasn’t strictly in the idiom of GCN, the show runners were gracious and granted us press passes that year. It turned out to be one of our favorite events and we have covered it every year since.

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Cinema of Swords: Swords in the Arthouse

Cinema of Swords: Swords in the Arthouse

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Historical adventure and fantasy films tend to be straightforward genre pictures long on plot and action and short on deep themes and introspection, which is okay, you can’t have everything.

Or can you? Some ambitious filmmakers want it all, and are willing to risk losing an audience who expects simple action and adventure by giving them ideas to think about or visuals that are striking but hard to parse. Films with such vaulting ambitions often fall into the category of Interesting Failures, and even if they somehow pull it off, in theaters they rarely make it out of the arthouse and into wide release. That’s the case with our subjects this time around, three unique movies too unusual to find a broad global audience. But perhaps one or more of them will resonate with you.

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Conan Well Captured: Conan: City of the Dead by John C. Hocking

Conan Well Captured: Conan: City of the Dead by John C. Hocking

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Conan: City of the Dead (Titan Books, June 18, 2024). Cover by Jeffrey Alan Love

John C. Hocking’s (1960 -) Conan and the Emerald Lotus came along in 1995, near the end of the Tor Conan pastiche series of books. I’d read a lot of pastiches early but by ’95 was burned out on them and stopped picking up the new ones. So I never read Hocking’s entry. Until now.

In 2024, Titan Books published Conan City of the Dead, by Hocking. It contained Conan and the Emerald Lotus, and a second pastiche called Conan and the Living Plague. Hocking had written Living Plague under contract with Conan Properties, but when the ownership changed hands, the book fell into a limbo that lasted some 25 years.

The wait must have been agonizing for Hocking, but the result was a very nice hardcover printing of both his books together, with some neat interior illustrations by Richard Pace. The cover art is uncredited.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hammett & ‘The Girl with the Silver Eyes’ (My intro)

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hammett & ‘The Girl with the Silver Eyes’ (My intro)

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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)

 

Pulp Fest took place last week in Pittsburgh. It’s a really cool event, and the Hilton Doubletree is a nice site. Steeger Books rolls out its summer line at this event. And for the second year in a row, there was a new Continental Op collection, with a brand new intro by yours truly. This is my sixth intro for Steeger, and getting to write about Dashiell Hammett is a definite thrill. It’s about four times as long as my Fast One Intro. I could dig into Hammett for months. Check out my intro to that Volume Two, and then check out the book itself. Hammett is regarded as the Master, for good reason.

The Complete Black Mask Cases of the Continental Op, Volume One: Zigzags of Treachery, ended with “The House in Turk Street.” That was the tenth Op story, and as I wrote in the introduction to that volume:

‘For me, it’s in “The House in Turk Street” (which was adapted for the 2002 Samuel L. Jackson movie, No Good Deed) where we really see the classic Hammett for the first time. The characters, the pace, the tension, the plot elements: he was moving from learning, to improving, to the verge of mastering.’

Hammett had been honing his craft, and “The House on Turk Street” really saw things come together. While that was the first Hammett story to appear under Phil Cody’s editorship, it was surely accepted by George Sutton.

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Quatro-Decadal Review: Weird Tales, November 1989, edited by John Betancourt, George H. Scithers, and Darrell Schweitzer

Quatro-Decadal Review: Weird Tales, November 1989, edited by John Betancourt, George H. Scithers, and Darrell Schweitzer

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Weird Tales, Fall 1989 (Terminus Publishing). Cover by J.K. Potter

There has been quite the gap in my reviews. I’ve been high-centered on Weird Tales. Many factors played a role in this — mostly that it is not a small magazine by any stretch. Then there is the fact that I read it in early 2023, got distracted by other things, and had to re-read it to write about it.

As readers of these reviews know, I don’t hold back re: spoilers for 35-year old stories. New readers, be warned!

Frequent readers will also recall that I often hypothesize on the thoughts and drives of the editors, but in this case I don’t have to hypothesize — my friends, we live in the future and I was able to get the straight dope right from The Grey Eminence himself: Darrell Schweitzer.

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Robot Avatars, Criminal Combines, and a Sisterhood of Space Pilots: July-August 2024 Print SF Magazines

Robot Avatars, Criminal Combines, and a Sisterhood of Space Pilots: July-August 2024 Print SF Magazines

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July-August 2024 issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction & Fact.
Cover art by John Sumrow (for “Sisters of the Flare”) and Shutterstock

Might as well get the bad news out of the way up front. There’s still no new issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but we hope for better news next month.

Unfortunately, that’s the same thing we said two months ago, and two months before that. We’re now 2/3rds of the way through 2024, and F&SF has published only a single issue. Magazine publishing is hard, especially these days, so if they can get back on track by the end of the year, all will certainly be forgiven. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, there’s plenty of great fiction in the print magazines we do have in hand, the July-August issues of Asimov’s SF and Analog, including new stories from Greg Egan, James Van Pelt, Susan Palwick, R. Garcia y Robertson, Leah Cypess, Genevieve Valentine, Stephen Case, Alex Irvine, Michael F. Flynn, Alice Towey, Thoraiya Dyer, and lots more.

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A to Z Review: “The Pagan Rabbi,” By Cynthia Ozick

A to Z Review: “The Pagan Rabbi,” By Cynthia Ozick

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A to Z Reviews

Over the past several years, I’ve embarked on a series of year-long review cycles at Black Gate. In 2018, I reviewed a story-a-day to coincide with an author whose birthday it was. In 2022, I selected stories completely at random from my collection to review. In both of those cases, the projects served to find forgotten and minor works of science fiction that spanned a range of years. They also served to make me read stories and authors who I haven’t read before, even if they were in my collection.

For this year’s project, I’ve compiled a list of all the stories and novels in my collection. I then identified the first and last works for each letter of the alphabet and over the next twelve months, I’ll be looking at those works of fiction, starting with Vance Aandahl’s “Bad Luck” and ending with David Lee Zweifler’s “Wasted Potential.” Looking at the 52 works (two for each letter), I find that I’ve only reviewed one of the works previously. Interestingly, given the random nature of the works, only three novels made the list, while four anthologies have multiple stories on the list. The works range in publication date from 1911’s “The Hump,” by Fernan Caballero to Zweifler’s story from last year.

The letter O provides another one of those nice coincidences in stories. Last week, I reviewed Jack Oakley’s “Fiat Silva” which explored a young boy’s commune with nature. This week, Cynthia Ozick writes of a rabbi who similarly communes with nature, although with a darker outcome.

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