Goth Chick News: Lego Jaws? Just Take My Money Now

Goth Chick News: Lego Jaws? Just Take My Money Now

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The original design submitted by Diving Faces (aka Jonny Campbell)

During 2020 when I was looking to fill quite a lot of downtime, I discovered the Lego Ideas website. Though I have never been a Lego builder or collector, I am still endlessly fascinated by the incredible creations true aficionados come up with. At Lego Ideas, hardcore Lego builders create and showcase unique designs. There are regular “challenges” creators can enter, but the big prize goes to those ideas submitted to the new products challenge. In the end, the creation in that category, with the most community votes, becomes a new Lego set produced for sale.

In May 2022, a Lego master builder going by the handle “Diving Faces” submitted a build depicting the final scene in the movie Jaws. In that scene it’s the shark against the three heroes, Quint (Robert Shaw), Brody (Roy Scheider) and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), in Quint’s boat the Orca. “Diving Faces,” recently unmasked as Lego-master Jonny Campbell, created a 14-inch-high replica of the boat, as well as the iconic shark, all with Legos.

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We Are All Time Traveling Together: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

We Are All Time Traveling Together: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

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The Ministry of Time (Avid Reader Press, May 7, 2024)

Perhaps second only to space travel, science fiction is obsessed with time travel and in particular the paradox that if we go back to the past, how do we affect the future; can we inadvertently or purposely alter our “present”? Sometimes the answer is that your somehow being in the past is essential to determining your present (e.g., Kindred by Octavia Butler where the protagonist travels back to antebellum South to ensure an ancestor stays alive). Other times the innocent butterfly effect (e.g., Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder) has disastrous consequences; even attempting something seemingly good, such as thwarting a presidential assassination, proves catastrophic (e.g., Stephen King’s 1/22/63 ). Then there’s the question of how visitors from the future to our present seek to change future events (e.g., the Terminator movie franchise).

H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine is a canonical SF work because it offers a technology, rather than magical intervention, that enables time travel (hence the title). In addition to its social criticism, The Time Machine is a quintessential adventure tale. The hero enters a strange land populated by equally strange different beings nonetheless still sort of like us, whose use of advanced technology causes disaster. The hero manages escape, but then mysteriously disappears, perhaps in search of something better than what awaits back home.

Which brings us to Kaliane Bradley’s Ministry of Time, in which she reverse-engineers a number of these time travel and adventure tropes.

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Truth, Lies, and Vinyl Wonderland

Truth, Lies, and Vinyl Wonderland

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Vinyl Wonderland (Castle Bridge Media,
June 25, 2024). Cover uncredited

Some months back, I was toiling away in the vast Indiana compound of Black Gate, when I received a text from publisher John O’Neill, who had just finished reading my new novel, Vinyl Wonderland. He told me how much he enjoyed it –– don’t take my word for it, ask him –– and then he told me how sorry he was.

“What for?” I asked.

“Well,” said John, “if you had to live through even half of what your main character went through, then you’ve had one hell of a rough ride.”

I thought about what John had said as I made my nightly rounds of the massive server farm that houses all of Black Gate’s backlogged posts (including over one hundred of mine). Eventually, I crawled off to bed, feeling hopeful that the local kobolds wouldn’t stage another uprising until next month, so that I could get a good night’s rest.

The morning brought clarity, as it often does, and I sat up in bed like a shot. “A liar,” I declared, quoting Quintilian, “should have a good memory!”

Fiction is a lie, after all, spun from gossamer truths, and therefore I, as a writer of fiction, must be a liar. It follows that to succeed in my craft, I must cultivate an excellent memory. Logic (and Quintilian) demand it.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hardboiled Manila – Jo Gar

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hardboiled Manila – Jo Gar

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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)

Several hardboiled books were not actually novels at the start. They were multi-part serials in the Pulp magazines of the day. Perhaps the most famous of these is Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, which ran for five installments from September 1929 through January of 1930. Likewise, Ned Beaumont’s four-part adventure became The Glass Key. The same happened with The Continental Op. And it wasn’t just Hammett. Paul Cain’s The Fast One is arguably the finest hardboiled novel ever – and it was a serial.

Raoul Whitfield’s The Laughing Death enthralled readers for nine issues in a row. A five-issue story became Green Ice; and Ben Jardinn spent three issues working on a murder in Death in a Bowl. The author of several novels for juvenile boys, Whitfield actually wrote another hardboiled novella, except it wasn’t collected and issued separately, so it’s not regarded as a book. And this was the only serial featuring his wonderful island detective, Jo Gar.

WARNING – THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD!
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Remembering Carl Jacobi

Remembering Carl Jacobi

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Revelations in Black by Carl Jacobi (Jove/HBJ, January 1979). Cover uncredited

D.H. Olson delivered this eulogy for Carl Jacobi on Friday, August 29, 1997 at Lakewood Chapel in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was included in Masters of the Weird Tale: Carl Jacobi, published by Centipede Press in May 2014. Our deepest thanks to D.H. Olson for permission to reprint it here, and special thanks to Jerad Walters at Centipede Press for providing the text.

When R. Dixon Smith asked me to speak here today, I was honored, but also somewhat taken aback. There are others, after all, who have known Carl Jacobi both better, and longer, than I. Still, when one is asked to do honor to a man whom one has admired for years, one can hardly say no.

First, to the “facts” as they may be found in the public record.

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A Year of Demonic Public Service: The Fallible Fiend by L. Sprague de Camp

A Year of Demonic Public Service: The Fallible Fiend by L. Sprague de Camp

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The Fallible Fiend (Signet/New American Library, February 1973). Cover uncredited

This is another in my series of looks at fairly obscure SF from the ’70s and ’80s. In this case, I rescued a book that I had bought used decades ago from the chaos of my bookshelves. Most of the other writers I’ve discussed so far have been somewhat forgotten (or were never really known at all) but L. Sprague de Camp is an SFWA Grand Master, and a writer I and many others remember with great affection.

De Camp (1907-2000) began publishing SF in 1937 with “The Isolingual,” and was from the beginning a popular and prolific writer. He wrote both Fantasy and Science Fiction, though by the end of his long career the bulk of his work was Fantasy. His preferred mode was lightly cynical humor — this imbued his SF such as the Viagens Interplanetarias series, and his Fantasy beginning with his Incomplete Enchanter stories written with Fletcher Pratt.

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Beating Heart & Battle Axes – New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine Forges a Book

Beating Heart & Battle Axes – New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine Forges a Book

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Beating Hearts & Battle Axes – A Romantic Sword & Sorcery Anthology seeking funding, championed by New Edge Sword & Sorcery magazine. Cover Art is by M.E. Morgan

New Edge Sword and Sorcery Magazine, championed by Oliver Brackenbury, has emerged over the last few years to provide a market with “love for the classics, and an inclusive, boundary-pushing approach to storytelling.”  Black Gate has featured the crowdfunding for and reviews of the initial volumes (link).  Today we highlight a crowdfunding endeavor that is in progress now, set to end on July 20th: a collection of six stories called Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes. Starting with this new anthology, Oliver Brackenbury (Publisher) & Jay Wolf (Editor) will carry that same approach into the Brackenbury Books lineup. It’s a bold meeting of Sword & Sorcery and the current zeitgeist in fantasy publishing: Romantasy. Some of the stories get quite spicy, too!

Check out the Beating Heats & Battle Axes campaign now!

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A to Z Reviews: “Know Your Target Audience,” by Dan Mygind

A to Z Reviews: “Know Your Target Audience,” by Dan Mygind

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A to Z Reviews

In 2010, Carl-Eddy Skovgaard selected several examples of Danish science fiction to be translated into English. The stories were published in the anthology Sky City and included Dan Mygind’s “Know Your Target Audience,” which originally appeared in 2007 as “Kend din målgruppe” in Skovgaard’s anthology Lige under overfladen: en dansk sf originalantologi.

Mygind’s story is set in a futuristic world five decades after a dirty bomb exploded in the Copenhagen subway system, leaving the city uninhabitable. Straight Talk is an entertainment and news, or perhaps propaganda, organization that has just had a major success running the World Song Competition. While celebrating, Straight Talk CEO Ole Kraft finds himself cornered by Peter Nielsen, one of the company’s employees who has a tendency toward believing in conspiracy theories.

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Goth Chick News: Bill Skarsgård as THE Classic Vampire? Yes Please

Goth Chick News: Bill Skarsgård as THE Classic Vampire? Yes Please

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It was during the silent movie era, which lasted from 1894 to 1929, that Bram Stoker penned his most famous work, Dracula (1897). However, it wasn’t Stoker who decided to bring his vampire to the silver screen, but instead, German filmmaker F.W. Murnau ultimately plagiarized Dracula for his 1922 film Nosferatu, kicking off one of the first high-profile copyright cases in history.

Florence Stoker, Bram Stoker’s widow, was living in London when she received the program of the Berlin premiere of Nosferatu that proclaimed the film was “adapted from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” She realized Nosferatu was violating Stoker’s copyright and therefore costing her royalties. As his widow, Florence was entirely reliant on Stoker’s legacy, so she decided to act.

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Lovely Ladies and Pleistocene Behemoths: A Visit to the Hollow Earth with Edgar Rice Burroughs

Lovely Ladies and Pleistocene Behemoths: A Visit to the Hollow Earth with Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Caroline Munro, and a pair of Pleistocene behemoths, in At the Earth’s Core

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with “hollow earth” stories, a style of fantasy fiction that presents ancient, lost societies of people (and/or humanoids) living deep under the earth, where Jurassic and Pleistocene behemoths — as well as uncategorized horrors — struggle to survive in the subterranean jungles of a sunless world.

My favorite of this genre is the Pellucidar series, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which began in 1914 when At the Earth’s Core was serialized in All-Story Weekly, before the novel was published in book format.

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