Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Wolves and Scorpions

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Wolves and Scorpions

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Brotherhood of the Wolf (France, 2001)

The boom in heroic fantasy novels in the wake of the success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Conan revival means there is plenty of imaginative literary fodder available for film adaptations, providing heroes, villains, and plot structures ready-made for cinema. But there are also original fantasy films, of course, movies with stories and scripts written for the screen rather than drawn from books. These are often wilder and less moored to reality than their literary siblings, occasionally resulting in unlooked-for gems that are enjoyable even for repeated viewings, especially when created by a director with a strong, personal vision.

But just as often we get a by-the-numbers retread made by Hollywood hacks that is, at best, merely professional entertainment. This week we have one of each from just past the turn of our current century.

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Git Gud, Scrub

Git Gud, Scrub

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Image by Van3ssa 🩺🎵 Desiré 🙏 Dazzy 🎹 from Pixabay

Good afterevenmorn!

This post is for the baby writers out there, those of you who have finished your first book, or will be finishing soon and are deciding what to do with it. If you’ve done your research on the publishing process, this post will not come as a surprise to you. There are however, still a large number of writers entering the publishing space clinging to much-disproven ideas about what it’s going to look like.

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Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: ‘A Toast to Nero Wolfe, & ‘A Stay at Home Intro’

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: ‘A Toast to Nero Wolfe, & ‘A Stay at Home Intro’

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Last week I gave a big recap of April’s Wolfe Pack gathering at the Greenbrier Resort, in West Virginia. Too Many Cooks, the fifth Wolfe novel, takes place at Kanawha Spa. Kanawha is essentially the Greenbrier, and that’s why the Wolfe Pack has a fun weekend there every five-ish years. This was the fifth of those, and my first.

As I mentioned last week, I gave a toast to Nero Wolfe at the Friday Night (American) Dinner. The whole gathering was run by the Wolfe Pack Wereowance, Ira Matesky. He kindly let me hand out a printed copy of my Stay at Home Series, to the attendees, as a perk.

You can read the entire Stay at Home series here at Black Gate – no charge. :-). Just click on the links at the end of this post. I recommend reading them in order – it will definitely make more sense.

I was tabbed late for the honor (‘That Byrne guy? His posts make sense most of the time. Get him to do it”). So, I wrote the entire speech the day I arrived, sitting on this sofa in the North Parlor (I called it the piano room. I had a couple more pics of it in last week’s post).

I didn’t have an Archie with me, so it’s good that no one took a shot at me through the windows, from the balcony. Though I’d like to think I didn’t annoy anyone THAT much in my short time there. The comments under this post may disabuse me of that notion…

My toast was related to the Stay at Home series, in looking at Nero Wolfe and the Brownstone as something timeless, while the times around us changed. During the Pandemic, dramatically.

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Future Treasures: Vinyl Wonderland by Mark Rigney

Future Treasures: Vinyl Wonderland by Mark Rigney

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

Mark Rigney will be familiar to most long-time readers at Black Gate. He wrote his first blog post for us (Portals: A Writer Blogs About Process) more than a dozen years ago, and never really stopped, with more than a hundred articles here over the last decade. We published several of his excellent short stories as part of our Black Gate Online Fiction library, starting with “The Trade,” and serialized his complete novel In the Wake of Sister Blue back in 2015.

Mark is perhaps best known to Black Gate readers as the author of the Renner & Quist novels — The Skates, Sleeping Bear, Check-Out Time, and Bonesy — featuring unlikely occult investigators Reverend Renner and retired investigator Dale Quist. Fellow BG blogger William Patrick Maynard called them “Funny, moving, enlightening, entertaining – Mark Rigney’s Renner & Quist series is in a class of its own. The recommendations come no stronger.”

His latest novel Vinyl Wonderland, on sale in three weeks from Castle Bridge Media, has all the markings of a breakout book. It’s a terrifically twisty mystery with a fantastical bent, and easily the best novel I’ve read so far this year.

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Vintage Treasures: Cave of Stars by George Zebrowski

Vintage Treasures: Cave of Stars by George Zebrowski

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Cave of Stars (Eos/HarperCollins, December 2000). Cover art by Bob Eggleton

I don’t know much about George Zebrowski.

I probably should. According to ISFDB he’s written more than a dozen science fiction novels, including the John W. Campbell Award-winner Brute Orbits (1999). He’s edited over a dozen anthologies, including four Synergy volumes and three Nebula Awards collections, and was the editor of The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1970-74, and again from 1983-90. With his domestic partner Pamela Sargent he’s produced four Star Trek novels, and all on his own he published four collections of short fiction. That’s a pretty impressive career no matter how you slice it.

But I’ve never read any of his fiction, so when his 1999 novel Cave of Stars showed up in a small paperback collection I bought on eBay last year, I was very intrigued.

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A to Z Reviews: “Tag,” by David Kablack

A to Z Reviews: “Tag,” by David Kablack

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A to Z Reviews

David Kablack’s “Tag” appeared in the 18th issue of the magazine Pirate Writings, which would change its name to Fantastic Stories of the Imagination with the next issue. One of the features of Pirate Writings was the inclusion of a short-short story section.  The first story in the section in this particular issue is set in a small town. Charlie, the O’Reilley twins, Wally, and Black Tom O’Faolin, all teenagers on the cusp of adulthood, are spending time playing a game of tag on one of the rare days off the working members of the group have.

Their game is interrupted by one of the village’s outcasts, a hunchback whose father is unknown and whose mother has died, hobbles past them on his way home from the market. Being young boys faced with someone who is an outsider, they stop their game to watch him go by.  As Charlie starts the game up again by tagging Tom, Tom gets an idea and tags the hunchback with enough force that he sends his purchases scattering across the ground.

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Goth Chick News: Saving One of the Best Vault Treasures for Last

Goth Chick News: Saving One of the Best Vault Treasures for Last

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An American Werewolf in London (Universal Pictures, August 21, 1981)

I am relieved to report that this is my final week of traveling which has been utterly unassociated with any fun save for my horror movie marathon. Notice how I carefully avoided additional adjectives like “classic” or “retro” for fear of catapulting you and me into a tailspin of denial. What I will say is that my binge-watching has been confined to movies that have celebrated their 40th anniversaries, so we’ll just leave it there.

Though nearly every evening of the last five weeks has seen me streaming my way through a list of titles inspired by my personal DVD archival vault (a couple of plastic tubs in my crawl space), I’ve chosen to do a deep dive on my favorites. This week’s marathon included The Lost Boys (1987), Prince of Darkness (1987), and Fright Night (1985), all of which would have made wonderful articles. But when the opening of American Werewolf in London (1981) started rolling on my laptop, there was no question what I’d be talking to you about today.

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A 1970s Future: The Man Responsible by Stephen Robinett

A 1970s Future: The Man Responsible by Stephen Robinett

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The Man Responsible (Ace Books, April 1978). Cover art by Vincent DiFate

This latest in my loose series of essays about fairly obscure 1970s/1980s SF books is about a writer who looked to be establishing a potentially significant career as what might be called a “Ben Bova” writer. Alas, Stephen Robinett contracted Hodgkin’s Disease as a young man, and died at only age 62 in 2004. His final two novels, Final Option and the sadly ironically titled Unfinished Business, were published in 1990, and are only borderline SF if at all, crime stories about a financial journalist investigating fraud. Robinett himself was a lawyer and a business journalist, and this background certainly informs his work, including the novel I’m discussing here.

I have called Robinett a Ben Bova writer, in the sense that the bulk of his stories were published in Ben Bova’s Analog, and his one collection, Projections, was part of a short-lived series of books from Ace labeled “Analog Books,” and edited by Bova. Robinett followed Bova to Omni, and his final short story appeared there in 1983. But Robinett also sold to Vertex, to Jim Baen’s Galaxy, and to Damon Knight’s Orbit, while his first sales were to John W. Campbell at Analog, beginning with “Minitalent” in March 1969. This makes him, along with Rob Chilson, Stepan Chapman and James Tiptree, Jr., one of Campbell’s latest discoveries.

The other interesting thing about Robinett’s first stories — all the way through a couple Galaxy pieces in 1975 — is that they were published as by “Tak Hallus.” And takhallus is a Persian word (derived from Arabic) meaning… pseudonym.

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New Treasures: Gogmagog and Ludluda by Jeff Noon and Steve Beard

New Treasures: Gogmagog and Ludluda by Jeff Noon and Steve Beard

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Gogmagog and Ludluda (Angry Robot, February 13, 2024 and December 3, 2024). Cover art by Ian McQue

I had a fruitful trip to the local Barnes & Noble last week. I brought home the latest issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog, as well as a nice assortment of recent-ish trade paperbacks. In the mix was a new novel by the team of Jeff Noon and Steve Beard, Gogmagog, with an intriguing cover that grabbed me immediately.

I dipped into Gogmagog as soon as I got home, and I found it delightful. It’s the tale of Arcadia “Cady” Meade, a 78-year-old retired sea captain, who’s about as crusty and entertaining as they come. She’s hired by a young girl and her robot guardian to take them down the river Nysis, past treacherous shores peopled with strange plants and robots — and haunted by the spirit of a terrifying river dragon.

Gogmagog is the opening volume in a two-book set. The closing book, Ludluda, arrives at the end of the year. Feast your eyes on the wonderful matching covers by Ian McQue above, courtesy of Reactor.com.

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Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Welcome to Kanawha Spa – The Wolfe Pack 2024 Greenbrier Weekend

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Welcome to Kanawha Spa – The Wolfe Pack 2024 Greenbrier Weekend

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So, last month, I joined fellow Wolfe Pack members for a long weekend at The Greenbrier Resort, in West Virginia. It was the fifth trip there for the group, though my first. It’s only a four hour-plus drive, which isn’t much for a Midwestern guy who also lived in Colorado and Texas.

Too Many Cooks is the fifth Nero Wolfe novel. I think it’s better than the four prior ones, and it’s the first where the series really starts to take off. It was followed by Some Buried Caesar. I think those two together, mark the beginning of excellence for the Wolfe Corpus.

Wolfe and Archie travel to Kanawha Spa, where a chef is murdered. Kanawha is the Greenbrier, which is why the Wolfe Pack sojourns there. It’s a VERY fancy resort, known for it’s golf courses (it was on the PGA tour before a flood wrecked things a bit), and for having a Cold War bunker for White House officials. It was never used, but you can take a tour of it now (I did not).

Here’s the Toast to Nero Wolfe I gave at the first dinner.

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