Erekosë and Me

Erekosë and Me

The Eternal Champion
The Eternal Champion, Cover by Frank Frazetta

Michael Moorcock’s Erekosë saga is contained in three novels, and graphic novel, and a couple of short stories which were incorporated into his novels of Elric, Corum, and Hawkmoon.  I was first introduced to the character when I came across him in those interpolated adventures and I sought out his own novel, The Eternal Champion. When I first read it in the early 1980s it became one of my favorites of Moorcock’s novels.  At the time, I had some difficulty tracking down the second novel, The Silver Warriors (original title Phoenix in Obsidian), which I eventually did at a used bookstore in New Haven, Connecticut. I then had to wait several years for the publication of The Dragon in the Sword, which linked Erekosë with Moorcock’s von Bek family.  It was only much later that I came across the graphic novel, The Swords of Hell, The Flowers of Heaven, written by Howard Chaykin, which is set between Phoenix in Obsidian and The Dragon in the Sword.

The series begins with John Daker, a married man with a child, who lives in London, although his wife and child are forgotten throughout the books. After a series of troubling dreams, Daker finds himself pulled into a different world, where he is informed by King Rigenos that he is Erekosë, the Eternal Champion of Humanity, and must help destroy the evil Eldren who threaten their existence. Yearning to return to the life he knew as Daker, Erekosë accepts his role unquestioningly and adapts quickly to his new existence. In many ways, he is a troubling aspects of the Eternal Champion.

Although his summoning is similar in many ways to the manner in which Corum is summoned at the beginning of The Bull and the Spear published a couple years after The Eternal Champion, one of the major differences between the two characters is that Corum was native to his world and Daker was not.  Enough of Daker remained within Erekosë, especially at the beginning of the novel that as a human raised on twentieth century earth the idea of being surrounded by slaves should have caused some issues. Similarly, for someone for whom World War II was such a recent memory, the idea of leading a genocide against the Eldren should have caused some moral qualms.

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Occult Detective Magazine #8 Now Available

Occult Detective Magazine #8 Now Available

Wraparound cover for Occult Detective Magazine 8. Cover art by Stefan Keller

Occult Detective Magazine is back on the racks! With an overstuffed issue — 227 whopping pages! — and brand new fiction from Rhys Hughes, Robert Guffey, Rebecca Buchanan, Uche Nwaka, C L Raven, Christina White, and many more. Here’s the issue summary from their website.

ODM #8 – packed with more fiction and reviews than ever before, 230pp of dark deeds and daring detection. Fourteen new stories – moorland hags, necromancy, rogue angels in Japan, Ley lines, period mysteries, Nigerian demons, serial killers, ghostly trains, surreal puzzles, and judgement in Haiti.

Whew! That’s a promising line-up, and I’ve already ordered my copy. Read on for complete details, including sample art and the fiction Table of Contents.

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You Should Be Streaming These Shows

You Should Be Streaming These Shows

I really didn’t start streaming series’ until 2020. So, there were a lot of shows already completed; or with multiple seasons out there. Now, I mix them in with watching network shows on demand (I just finished first watch of Suits, was fantastic), and movies. Today, I’m going to talk about some streaming shows I think you should check out.

COBRA KAI

I’m going to start with the single-best streaming show I’ve watched yet. I just completed the recently dropped season four of this continuation of the original Karate Kid franchise. Every season has been excellent, and I think that four is the best; but I can’t say definitively one of the earlier ones wasn’t the best.

It was developed for YouTube, but when YouTube dropped original programming after season two, Netflix picked it up. Thank goodness!

The show starts 34 years after the events in the first Karate Kid movie. Johnny Lawrence’s (William Zabka) life fell apart that day he lost the All Valley Karate Championship because of The Kick. Episode one shows us what a mess he is. Meanwhile, Daniel LaRusso went on to running an expensive automobile empire, living the high life with his lovely wife. They are total contrasts.

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Vintage Treasures: The Dominions of Irth Trilogy by Adam Lee (A. A. Attanasio)

Vintage Treasures: The Dominions of Irth Trilogy by Adam Lee (A. A. Attanasio)


The Dominions of Irth
Trilogy by Adam Lee (Avon Eos, 1998-2000). Covers uncredited

The first science fiction website I ever launched was the SF Site, way back in 1995. I partnered with Rodger Turner, Neil Walsh, and Wayne MacLaurin to start Canada’s first big SF book blog, and it was a big success, with plenty of early traffic and award nominations. Best of all, we were soon on a first-name basis with the publicity departments at most of the big publishing houses. That’s how I met Andy Heidel at Avon, who helped me understand their big relaunch as they morphed from Avon Nova into Avon Eos in 1998 — including why they jettisoned cover art in favor of purely design-focused covers (“We’re trying to be the next big thing,” Andy explained).

I loved Avon Eos, and their dedication to quality SF and exciting new authors, but I didn’t love those covers. Frankly, I think readers didn’t know what to make of all the abstract shapes and colors, and especially the lack of identifiable heroes or storytelling elements, and they stayed away in droves. Eos eventually reverted to traditional covers, but I don’t think it ever recovered, and it is no longer a functioning imprint.

I think that misfire hurt most of Avon’s authors in the late 90s. Including “Adam Lee,” the pseudonym A. A. Attanasio adopted to publish his critically acclaimed Dominions of Irth trilogy in the US. The series appeared with a series of generic cover designs, and pretty much sank like a stone. “Adam Lee” died a lonely death, and Attanasio returned to publishing under his own name.

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Living in the Labyrinth: Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi

Living in the Labyrinth: Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi


Piranesi
(Bloomsbury paperback reprint, September 28, 2021)

I stopped apologizing about preferring old books over new ones a long time ago. One of the best things about reading, after all, is that it’s a kingdom over which you are an absolute sovereign. You alone can confer the Order of the Garter; only you can shout, “Off with their heads!”

Nevertheless, while consistency is required of lesser beings, it need not be considered by monarchs, and so I decreed that the first book I read in 2022 would be Susanna Clarke’s fantasy Piranesi, which was published a little over a year ago, in September 2020. In this I was merely keeping a promise I made a few years ago here on Black Gate when I rhapsodized about Clarke’s previous novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I said then that when Clarke finished her next book, I would line up to read it the day it was published. I think I came reasonably close; that I missed it by fifteen months I can always blame on COVID. Why the hell not?

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New Treasures: The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

New Treasures: The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez


The Vanished Birds
(Del Rey, January 26, 2021)

January is that time of year when I browse BEST OF THE YEAR lists, wondering what I missed (it’s usually a lot). One title that shows up repeatedly is Simon Jimenez’s debut novel The Vanished Birds, which I picked up in paperback last January, and which promptly vanished into the towering to-be-read stack next to my big green chair. I need a filing system that’s more like a library, and less like a geological rock formation.

Anyway. While I didn’t make time to read the book, I didn’t fail to notice all the breathless notices. Kirkus Reviews, which called it “The best of what science fiction can be,” listed it as one of the Best Debut Fiction and Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the year; Martin Cahill at Tor.com proclaimed it “brilliant,” and Paul Di Filippo at Locus called it “not only the best debut novel I’ve read in ages, but simply one of the best SF novels in recent memory.” Here’s a slice from Martin’s enthusiastic review.

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Goth Chick News: The Scary Games I Can’t Wait to Play in 2022

Goth Chick News: The Scary Games I Can’t Wait to Play in 2022

I realize that persons of a certain age have literally been witness to dramatic (and drastic) evolutions. Consider the term “gamer.” Webster’s online dictionary defines this term as, “a person who plays video games or participates in role-playing games.” However, until the early 1990’s the definition stated only, “a person who plays or participates in role-playing games.” Literally, the term “gamer” immerged along with Gary Gygax and Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970’s, but now encompasses previously unimaginable experiences like VR.

Given the current Webster’s definition, I myself am a gamer and have been for… well… awhile, though there are younger gamers who might scoff at my saying so. However, when one has amassed enough expendable income to commission the building of a water-cooled supercomputer called “Winston” whose primary function is to run the mother of all VR gaming systems, I’m pretty comfortable with the label. And though I would likely be brutalized in the Warcraft waiting room, I have a significant talent in a certain type of gaming environment, most of which involve… wait for it… horror storylines.

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Random Reviews: “The Yeast Men” by David H. Keller

Random Reviews: “The Yeast Men” by David H. Keller

Amazing Stories, April 1928
Amazing Stories, April 1928, cover by Frank R. Paul

Throughout 2022, I’ll be reviewing short stories. Some of these may be classics, others forgotten. The two things that all will have in common is that they are part of my personal collection and they will be selected through a randomization process.  What works and authors I look at will be entirely selected by a roll of the dice.

The Yeast Men,” which originally appeared in the April 1928 issue of Amazing Stories, was the second science fiction story published by David H. Keller, M.D., as his byline often read. He had actually been publishing as early as 1895, with the story “Aunt Martha” in Bath Weekly, under one of many pseudonyms that he used. He is believed to have been the first psychiatrist to write science fiction.

When Hugo Gernsback launched Science Wonder Stories in 1929, he listed Keller as the magazine’s Associate Science Editor. Keller also served as the editor of Gernsback’s Sexology magazine from 1934 to 1938.  Keller lived from 1880 to 1966. He served in the US Medical Corps during World War II. A fan of H.P. Lovecraft, Keller was able to provide August Derleth with a sizable loan to keep Arkham House from going bankrupt during a period when there were cashflow issues.

“The Yeast Men” is set in 1930 in the fictitious European countries of Eupenia and Moronia. Premier Plautz of Eupenia is planning ahead for the next war with Moronia with the plan of utterly destroying the neighboring country, much as Cato the Elder ended every speech by calling for the destruction of Carthage, Plautz ends each speech calling for the destruction of Moronia.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: The Barbarian Boom, Part 3

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: The Barbarian Boom, Part 3

Conan the Destroyer (Universal Pictures, 1984)

Filmmakers jump on a hot new genre with alacrity if it looks like it can be reduced to an easily replicated formula. That was certainly the case with Eighties sword-and-sorcery films, which were happily adopted as a replacement for the dying genre of Westerns. Producers of formulaic genre and exploitation movies, such as the notorious Roger Corman, practically started an assembly line to produce quickie barbarian pictures. Following the heroic fantasy formula probably reached its qualitative peak with 1984’s Conan the Destroyer, which has a story by Marvel comics writers who had already worked out every variation of standard sword and sorcery plots and characters, so they knew what worked best. Following that film, the best fantasy movies of the later Eighties would be those that broke formula to a greater or lesser extent.

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Celebrate Derek Künsken’s First Trilogy, The Quantum Evolution

Celebrate Derek Künsken’s First Trilogy, The Quantum Evolution


The Quantum Evolution trilogy by Derek Künsken (Solaris; 2018, 2019, and 2021). Covers by Justin Adams

You lot know that every time one of our authors publishes a novel, we celebrate with dinner at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters in downtown Chicago. And you’re also aware that every time an author completes a trilogy, we bake a cake. So what do we do when a Black Gate author completes a trilogy, as our own Derek Künsken just did with the release of The Quantum War, the third novel in The Quantum Evolution?

Why, it’s cake for dinner, of course. In fact, it’s cake and bubbly for everyone! Have a drink on us to join in the celebration*!

(*Conditions apply. Must be 21 years old. Offer not valid outside the continental United States. Or anywhere that serves bubbly.)

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