Good afterevenmorn!
My social timelines have been abuzz… alright, they were abuzz a couple of weeks ago, I’m slow… with the news that a certain writer is a wee bit miffed that their attempts to be included in the programming at Worldcon this year had been left unanswered, resulting in their exclusion in the programming. Which on the surface, is not a great look for Worldcon.
“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)
Last year, Steeger Books put out its first deluxe edition hardback, containing all of Paul Cain’s short stories, as well as his lone novel, Fast One. I wrote the intro for Fast One, which is on every list of the greatest hardboiled Pulp novel (it battles The Maltese Falcon for my top spot). That was my sixth intro for Steeger, and it’s this week’s column. Clearly, I recommend reading this slim, recklessly-paced Pulp masterpiece.
Paul Cain’s Fast One is a relentless roller coaster ride, which never lets the reader catch their breath before the next heart-stopping drop. The hero, Gerry Kells, plays a never-ending chess game, in which new pieces are constantly added to the board. He maneuvers a constantly shifting labyrinth of players, alliances, and plots, like a Machievellian chess master. He doesn’t just respond to developments: He consistently moves to turn matters to his advantage. He is a hard guy, but he has a heart – which prevents him from being ruthless. A little more ruthlessness would have served him well.
Kells continually responds to the situations (which are often backed by a gat) thrown at him, by turning up the heat. Police, a newspaper, other gangsters – he’ll use, or take on, anything in the mix. It’s a continual sense of “What’s gonna happen next?” as you turn the pages. And when Kells gets an upper hand, a new wrench gums up the works.
Power, politics, and money: Kells continues to navigate this trilogy of shark-infested waters, right up to the final scene. If Kells had been willing to put a bad guy out of the story – or at least put a bullet in a knee or two, he would have had an easier time, moving forward. He leaves players on the board. And they’re not allies. He’s a tough guy, but he’s more honorable than his enemies.
Speaking of Caroline Munro (as I was in my last post Lovely Ladies And Pleistocene Behemoths: A Visit To The Hollow Earth With Edgar Rice Burroughs)… here’s an amusing bit of trivia regarding Space 1999.
In Season 2, Episode 20, “The Seance Spectre,” some members of the crew go mad due to being away from nature for so long, hurtling through space on Moonbase Alpha. Well, the episode was all about the hallucinations suffered by these people and their drastic actions taken. All of it was resolved, following a lot of action and conflict.
The funny bit was at the very end, the epilogue, if you would, in which Dr. Russell prescribes a method to prevent further hallucinations: The patients have to watch long hours of nature films until it psychologically becomes “boring” to them. At the command center, Tony and Allen were using this same theory in a different manner: They stood there staring at a photo of none other than Caroline Munro!
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The Doom That Came to Sarnath (Ballantine Books, November 1976). Cover by Murray Tinkelman
H.P. Lovecraft, creator of the Cthulhu Mythos, was one of the greatest horror writers of the 20th Century. But horror wasn’t all he produced, as editor Lin Carter adroitly pointed out in the introduction to The Doom That Came to Sarnath.
Those readers who know only the Cthulhu Mythos stories, know only a single side of Lovecraft… the Cthulhu Mythos, while completely his own invention, was constructed along the guidelines established by earlier writers whom he greatly admired… But far beyond his borrowing of basic techniques from Machen and Chambers, Lovecraft is more deeply indebted to the great Anglo-Irish fantasist, Lord Dunsany… not content to make up his own geography, Dunsany invented the religion to which his imaginary worlds paid worship. An extremely clever, even brilliant, idea, and one which has been used by many writers after him. Lovecraft used this theme as the basis for his own Cthulhu Mythos.
As a young reader, Lovecraft was enthralled by Dunsany’s superb fiction. Many of his earliest tales… are Dunsanian in texture and color… Last year I edited a volume of the most Dunsanian of these tales, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath… I would have liked to have included all the fiction from Lovecraft’s “Dunsanian period” in that single book, but the size of the volume would have been impractical. Hence, this second collection.
The Doom That Came to Sarnath contains 14 stories and poems from early in Lovecraft’s career (1919-1925), plus half a dozen later tales, including his famous collaboration with Harry Houdini, “Imprisoned With the Pharaohs.” Although many of the tales — including the title story — are deliciously macabre, there’s very little horror here. It is, as Lin Carter promised, a surprise and delight for those who know Lovecraft only as a horror writer.
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This blog post wasn’t supposed to be about our late daughter, Caitlin.
This was supposed to be a lovely list of awesome things we’ve published in the 10 years of Uncanny Magazine.
But right now, and honestly for quite some time, everything for us is about Caitlin.
For those of you unfamiliar with us…
A decade ago, Publishers/Editors-in-Chief Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas (that’s us) launched Uncanny Magazine, an online science fiction and fantasy magazine that features passionate SF/F fiction and poetry, gorgeous prose, provocative nonfiction, and a deep investment in diverse and inclusive SF/F culture — a magazine that believes there’s still plenty of room in the genre for tales that make you feel.
And Caitlin was with us every step of the way.
Jack Oakley published two science fiction short stories in the mid 90s. His debut, “The Tragedy of KL,” appeared in Weird Tales from Shakespeare, edited by Katharine Kerr and Martin H. Greenberg. His second story, “Fiat Silva,” was bought by the same editorial team and appeared in Enchanted Forests the following year.
While on a family camping trip, Adams finds the birds and the trees talking to him. Astounded by the wonder of being able to hear the trees, he learns that they talk to everyone. What sets him apart is that he actually spoke back to the trees. An unapologeticy environmentalist story, the trees describe the process of deforestation to Adam and ask for his help in stopping their plight. Adam, quite reasonably responds that as a young boy, there is little he can do to stop deforestation.
Alien: Romulus (20th Century Studios, August 16, 2024)
To begin, I’d like to review two important facts. First, with the 2019 acquisition of Fox, Disney became the owners of the long-running Alien sci-fi franchise. Second, in 2012 Ridley Scott, who created the original masterpiece that was Alien (1979), decided to leap back in after five other directors had a go at some portion of the story. This effectively scuttled the planned Alien movie we all deserved, which would have been a sequel to Aliens (1986) directed by Neill Blomkamp and would have ignored the movies which followed Aliens. This story would have reunited Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Hicks (Michael Biehn), and probably would have been awesome.
Instead, what we got was Sigourney Weaver permanently bowing out from the franchise, and two prequels from Scott, which were anything but awesome. Though nostalgia and eternal optimism caused die-hard fans to make Prometheus (2012) a technical box office hit ($130M budget against a $403M take), we’d learned our lesson by the time Alien: Covenant came around in 2017. It was considered a disappointment by Hollywood standards, bringing in less than half the ticket sales of its predecessor. Personally, I wished Scott would have kept his hands to himself.
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In the Hands of Glory (Timescape/Pocket Books, November 1981). Cover by Rowena Morrill
Here’s my new look at an SF paperback from the ’70s/’80s. Phyllis Eisenstein’s In the Hands of Glory is a book I eagerly bought and read back when it came out, in 1981. By a writer whose work I enjoyed. From a publishing imprint (Timescape, edited by David Hartwell) that I greatly respected. (Not to mention the Rowena Morrill cover which, let’s just say, overtly exaggerates certain physical characteristics of the protagonist relative to her actual depiction in the book.) And I had fond, but very dim, memories of the book. So I reread it.
Phyllis Eisenstein (1946-2020) was a Chicago writer. Black Gate is a Chicago-based ‘zine, and I’m originally from the Chicago area myself, and over the years I got to know Phyllis and her husband (and sometime collaborator) Alex fairly well, from meeting them at any number of conventions. Indeed, at this year’s Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention, I had a long conversation with Alex which touched on their time in Germany (Alex was in the military then) during which Phyllis drafted her first novel.
James (Doubleday, March 19, 2024), Kindred (Doubleday,
July 1979), and The Reformatory (S&S/Saga Press, October 31, 2023
Percival Everett’s James is receiving a lot of well-deserved critical praise. As the title indicates (and the choice of the formal name a key trope), this reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn elevates the escaped slave Jim from supporting stereotypical character to leading man status. Fearing he is about to be sold by his owner and separated from his family, James becomes a runaway not just for his own sake, but to find a way to free his wife and daughter. Along the way, he meets Huck who has just faked his death to escape an abusive father. So far we’re close to Twain’s original, and while Everett retains some events, the perspective shifts to focus on James’s journey towards safety and dignity.
As with many of Everett’s novels, James is a satire of white perceptions of Blacks, reinventing James as highly literate and articulate. In an ironic reversal of enslaver laws that prohibit educating slaves, all Blacks are well-spoken amongst themselves and only resort to uneducated and subservient slang when in presence of their white oppressors. James calls it a “slave filter”: “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them. The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us.”
Highly recommended, as is just about anything in the Everett catalog.
It’s a week off from A (Black) Gat in the Hand, as I am currently reading Pulp, but except for the constant revisiting of Norbert Davis’ Max Latin, I’m not listening to it (though The Continental Op is on tap).
I am constantly listening to audiobooks. I’m fortunate that my mind can multi-task, and I listen to them while driving, working, writing, when I go to sleep at night. It lets me get to things I wouldn’t have time to read. It’s often re-visiting something I read before. And I can fall asleep to something that isn’t new – no damage done. Here are some things I’ve listened to recently.
THE BLACK COMPANY – Glen Cook
A couple months ago, I scored a rare Q&A with the socially reclusive Glen Cook. It was mostly about his terrific Garrett, PI series, which I love. But it did touch on The Black Company. That series about a mercenary company is a foundation block for Dark Fantasy. I’ve read through the whole thing (except Port of Shadows, which I haven’t gotten around to yet) three times.
And over several months this year, I listened to the entire series on audiobook. As when I read it, I definitely like some books more than others. But it remains an epic, gripping saga. Again excluding 2018’s Port of Shadows, it’s ten books. I simply didn’t have time to re-read it (especially after re-reading most of the Garrett series for that Q&A). Listening to the books worked great. At least a book or two had a different narrator, based on gender needs. I liked the four narrators, with Marc Vietor reading the majority. That’s a key part of the audiobook experience. Definitely recommended.