Reading Leigh Grossman’s Sense of Wonder, the Longest Science Fiction Anthology Ever

Tuesday, January 7, 2025 Szymon Szott Comments 1 comment

I have finished reading ***Sense of Wonder***

Having just finished reading arguably the longest anthology of science fiction, I’ve written down some notes and thoughts.

TL;DR It’s an insanely long book, worth buying but not necessarily reading cover-to-cover.

About the Book

Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction, edited by Leigh Grossman, is a massive single-volume anthology of science-fiction. Don’t be fooled by the 992 print pages because that is with a tiny font. I read the Kindle version for which Amazon gives an average reading time of 140 hours. That is about 5 times as long as Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (itself a 1,200 page door-stopper). All in all, a huge dose of SF.

The book is classified and marketed as a textbook for teaching SF courses and rightly so. Besides over 150 stories (from short stories to novellas), it contains biographical entries about each author and additional essays about related topics. The appendices give advice to aspiring authors on writing and submitting SF stories.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Death (of a Detective) in Paradise

Monday, January 6, 2025 Bob Byrne Comments 7 comments

And we kick off 2025 with the return of the column that earned me regular gig here at Black Gate. I’m ostensibly the in-house mystery guy around here, though I’m way beyond all over the place. Death in Paradise is a police procedural (it is not, however, a buddy cop show) with a fair amount of humor, and it debuted on BBC1 on October 25, 2011. The show started airing a Christmas special a few years ago, and episode number 109 just aired on December 22, 2024.

The basic premise is that Scotland Yard assigns a DCI (Detective Chief Inspector) to duty on the island of Saint Marie (pronounced ‘San Marie’), located in the Lesser Antilles. Saint Marie was turned over to the British by the French roughly forty years before the show starts. So, it still has a French-Caribbean culture.

There is a four-person police unit, with the DCI (Richard Poole) joined by a local Detective Sergeant (Camille), and two local uniform ‘beat cops’ (Dwayne, and Fidel). There are two other regulars: the female owner of a local bar (Catherine, who is Camille’s mother), and the Police Superintendent (Patterson). Five of the six main characters are island natives, so this is a classic fish-out-of-water scenario.

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Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part One

Sunday, January 5, 2025 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 54 comments

I’ve been trying to remember when I first read The Lord of the Rings and it must’ve been when I was ten or so, meaning in 1976 or early 1977. I say this because my dad bought me The Silmarillion for Christmas and it was published in September 1977. That means I read The Hobbit when I was nine or so. Coming up on 59 next year, it means I’ve been reading Prof. Tolkien’s work for nearly fifty years.

I assume I came across The Hobbit on my dad’s shelf next to his living room chair. It’s where he kept the various books he was reading at any given time. His habit was to stay downstairs till midnight or one, reading and listening to WQXR, the New York Times’ old classical station. I’d definitely read it before November 1977 when the Rankin & Bass The Hobbit premiered. As a side note, my dad tried to get our first color TV before it aired, but he wasn’t able to.

I didn’t read LotR right away, but when I did, I found myself in competition with my dad to finish them. With only the single set of books in the house, we read them in tandem. I remember rushing home from church to see if I could grab The Fellowship of the Ring before my dad had finished reading The New York Times that morning. Even though some days I got the book before him, he read faster and more often and finished several days before me. Hey, I was only ten.

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Prehistrionics, Part I

Saturday, January 4, 2025 Neil Baker Comments 6 comments

We’re off on another adventure filled to the brim with disappointment. 20 films I’ve never seen before, all free to stream, all dinosaur-based.

Oh God.

Hatched (2021) Prime

Just how bad is the CG? Almost okay except when interacting with lunch.

Sexy scientist? Yep.

Mumbo jumbo? Cloning, reanimation, gene foolery.

There are a couple of production company names that, if they pop up at the beginning, let me know what to expect. Uncorked is one of them. Imagine my surprise then, when this film turned out to be competently shot and, for the most part, decently acted.

Filmed on one stately location in the UK, it’s basically a hide and seek story with CG dinosaurs. Despite the (you would imagine) adrenaline-laced plot, it’s all very pedestrian, nobody seems overly concerned, and I counted four, count ‘em, four very slow head turns in reaction to growling, just before snacking.

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A to Z Reviews: “Wasted Potential,” by David Lee Zweifler

Friday, January 3, 2025 Steven H Silver Comments 1 comment

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 2023.

After a year, we finally come to the end of the alphabet, with David Lee Zweifler’s “Wasted Potential,” which was published in the November/December 2023 issue of Analog.

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T.H. White’s Legacy on Contemporary Television

Thursday, January 2, 2025 markrigney Comments 4 comments

*Ted Lasso* (Warner Bros. Television/Apple TV+, 2020-2023)

I recently re-watched Ted Lasso, and as I took in the final episode, I was reminded quite forcibly of The Queen’s Gambit. The question was, why? I quickly cued up The Queen’s Gambit, and sure enough, my memory held true: both shows employ what I like to call — what I am going to call, starting here, with this essay –– the T.H. White Stratagem.

If I may explain. The T.H. White Stratagem (a clear misnomer, since to my knowledge he deployed it only once) stems from the climax of The Sword in the Stone, book one of The Once and Future King. If you haven’t read this wonderful masterwork, please skip the remainder of this essay, and come back later. For those that have read TOFK, recall that in London, at the great tournament, (Sir) Kay dispatches the Wart to run back and get his sword, which Kay has foolishly left back at the hostel.

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The Sword & Planet Fiction of Robert Moore Williams: Zanthar

Wednesday, January 1, 2025 Charles Gramlich Comments 14 comments

Jongor Fights Back (Popular Library, 1970). Cover by Frank Frazetta

Robert Moore Williams (1907 – 1977) wrote a lot of books, over 100. I’ve read two of them and that means there’s a 100 or so more books out there I won’t need to read before I die, including the ones he wrote under pseudonyms such as John Browning, H. H. Harmon, E. K. Jarvis, and Russell Storm. He also wrote an autobiography called Love is Forever – We Are for Tonight.

As a writer myself, I hesitate to be too critical of other writers. I know how difficult it is to finish a novel. But I don’t know how else to say it other than that — in my opinion — Moore was not a good one. The first book I found by him was Jongor Fights Back, a Tarzanesque effort featuring Jongor in a lost land. It was readable, but just barely. The cover, by Frank Frazetta, was a million times better.

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The Failed Giant: Five Tributes to Barry N. Malzberg

Tuesday, December 31, 2024 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Barry N. Malzberg died on December 19. In his Black Gate obituary, Rich Horton wrote:

Malzberg was in his unique way a true giant in our field. Barry himself, in his later years, seemed to regard his career as a failure, but it was no such thing. He may have stopped publishing novels out of a feeling the publishing world wasn’t receptive to his work, but the best of what he did publish is outstanding, and thoroughly representative of his own vision.

Tributes and reminiscences have poured in over the last week, and many amplify Rich’s comments, especially in regard to both the importance of Malzberg’s work, and his embittered attitude towards the field near the end of his career. Several writers, including Adam-Troy Castro and Gregory Feeley, have generously granted permission for me to reprint their lengthy comments here, including several fascinating anecdotes.

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The Best of Bob: 2024

Monday, December 30, 2024 Bob Byrne Comments 5 comments

Happy 2025! Let’s kick butt for another year. Or at least, limp to the finish 52 weeks. from now. I take what I can get. I started a Best of Bob feature last year. And while it may seem I’m constantly finding folks to write my column for me (hey – it’s a gift!), some of you Black Gaters may be surprised that I occasionally actually write my own essays for the Monday morning slot. John O’Neill is too savvy an editor for me to completely fool him for over decade.

So here are what I thought were ten of my better efforts in 2024. Hopefully you saw them back when I first posted them. But if not, maybe you’ll check out a few now. Ranking them seemed a bit egotistical, so they’re in chronological order. Let’s go!

1) Roaming the Old West, with Holmes on the Range (February 5, 2024)

It might look like I just throw something together every week (and looks aren’t always deceptive). But when I can find the time, I love putting together something special. And after reading/re-reading the entire series, I really nailed a three-part series on Steve Hockensmith’s Sherlock Holmes influenced, Old West mysteries about cowboy brothers Old Red and Big Red.

I followed up a pretty solid series overview, with the first-ever comprehensive chronology! And then, we rounded it out with a great Q&A from Steve himself. This is a terrific series: a great read, and solid on audiobook. Late in the year, the first two novels in a spin-off series that’s more Old West adventure than Holmes-flavored, came out. I’m looking forward to more of all aspects of the Double-A Western Detective Agency.

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From Al-Qadim to The East Mark Gazetteer

Sunday, December 29, 2024 Jeffrey Talanian Comments 4 comments

*Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures* (TSR, 1992). Cover by Jeff Easley

Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures, by Jeff Grubb (with Andria Hayday), was one of the finest settings produced by TSR during the AD&D 2E (Second Edition) days.

“Magic carpets, ghoulish vixens, genies rising from the sand in a whirlwind of smoke and fire — such wonders, spin into tales by the fabled Scheherazade, enchanted a king for a thousand and one nights.”

The setting is inspired by Sinbad, Ali Baba, and other classics from Arabian Nights.

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