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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Horror and Beauty in Edgar Rice Burrough’s Work: An Interview with Robert Allen Lupton

Horror and Beauty in Edgar Rice Burrough’s Work: An Interview with Robert Allen Lupton

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We have an ongoing series at Black Gate on “Beauty in Weird Fiction,” where we corner an author and query them about their muses and methods to make ‘repulsive things’ become ‘attractive to readers.’ Previous subjects have included Darrell Schweitzer, Anna Smith Spark, Carol Berg, C.S. Friedman, John R. Fultz, and John C. Hocking (whose Conan and the Living Plague novel is finally due out this June 2024, so you should read that too to get psyched). Anyway, see the full list of interviews at the end of this post.

This interview focuses on the legendary Edgar Rice Burroughs and an aficionado of his work, Robert Allen Lupton. The latter has published an amazing 2000 articles on www.erbzine.com, the Official Edgar Rice Burroughs Tribute and Weekly Webzine Site. Robert Allen Lupton is also a writer of 200 short stories, four novels, and six collections of adventure fiction, so this forum serves as a great opportunity to learn about past and present storytelling with a touch of horror in it.

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Andre Norton: Gateway to Magic, Part III

Andre Norton: Gateway to Magic, Part III

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The first two installments in this series are here:

Andre Norton: Gateway to Magic, Part I
Andre Norton: Gateway to Magic, Part II

As I mentioned in the first two articles in this series, I’ve read a LOT of Andre Norton. Here are just a few pics from my collection that I haven’t yet discussed. Most of these have little to do directly with Sword & Planet fiction but they still contain Norton’s patented characters and action.

1. The Last Planet, which is a variant title for Star Rangers. (Two copies here: Ace 1974 — no cover artist credited although could this be a Whelan?, and Ace 1955 — Harry Barton cover).

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A to Z Reviews: “Captain Starlight and the Flying Saucer,” by S. Ivan Jurisevic

A to Z Reviews: “Captain Starlight and the Flying Saucer,” by S. Ivan Jurisevic

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A to Z Reviews

An interesting coincidence occurred when I hit the Js. The first author in my collection was Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, whose story “The Haunted House on Rocketworks Street” appeared in an anthology put together in honor of Worldcon 75 in Helsinki, Finland. The final author in my collection in S. Ivan Jurisevic, whose story “Captain Starlight and the Flying Saucer” appeared in Interzone issue 146, which proclaims that it is the “Special Australian WorldCon issue.”

Although this is Jurisevic’s only story listed in the Internet Science Fiction Database, the about an author blurb at the end notes that he previously published a story about Captain Starlight in the magazine Omega. In any event, this story is a typical tall tale about a folkloric character. It reads as if Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill had relocated to the Australian outback and helped form the landscape.

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Goth Chick News: Now It’s The Fly’s Turn to Crawl Out of the Vault

Goth Chick News: Now It’s The Fly’s Turn to Crawl Out of the Vault

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The Tingler (Columbia Pictures, July 1959), and The Fly (20th Century Fox, July 1958)

Though I have previously described how my Dad first introduced me to classic horror, Mom would likely be mortified to know I credit her as well. Though there is one lone, totally fabulous drive-in movie theater left in Chicagoland, Mom used to tell me how there were a dozen or more ‘back in the day.’ She explained how, when she and Dad were dating, there was no finer way to spend a summer evening than seeing the latest film under the stars. What seemed strange to me about these stories were the titles of the movies they used to see. Apparently, in her youth, Mom also liked horror.

I remember listening with rapt attention as she described a scene from The Tingler in which the disembodied spinal cord crawled up over the front seat to attack a couple at the drive-in. She said this was the scariest thing she had ever seen as she and Dad were watching The Tingler at the drive-in. Mom also talked about The Fly (1958), starring David Hedison, Patricia Owens, and Vincent Price. Apparently, Vincent Price’s performance gave her nightmares.

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H. Bruce Franklin, February 28, 1934 — May 19, 2024

H. Bruce Franklin, February 28, 1934 — May 19, 2024

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H. Bruce Franklin

I was sad to learn that H(oward) Bruce Franklin, emeritus John Cotton Dana endowed Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark and author of numerous books, essays, and exhibitions related to science fiction, died at the age of 90 on May 19.  On a personal note, in grad school I took his seminar in science fiction studies, which reignited my interest in science fiction and prompted me to start writing about it. So, for better or worse, I probably wouldn’t be posting here were it not for Dr. Franklin.

During the 1960s, Dr. Franklin was fired from Stanford despite being tenured supposedly for inciting student anti-Vietnam war protests. A former Air Force navigator and intelligence office in the Strategic Air Command, he also resigned his commission in protest of that war.

While his range of published work ranged from Melville studies to prison literature to fish ecology, he frequently used science fiction as a lens to comment upon American history, particularly as it relates to Vietnam and the forever wars that extended to Iraq and Afghanistan.  He was awarded a number of honors, including the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) Pilgrim Award and Pioneer Award, as well as an Eaton Award. He was a Distinguished Scholar for the International Association for Fantastic in the Arts, and was a Guest Curator for the Star Trek and the Sixties exhibit at the Smithsonian and Hayden Planetarium. From its inception up until 2002, Dr. Franklin was a consulting editor of Science Fiction Studies.

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Besties: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by R.F. Kuang

Besties: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by R.F. Kuang

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The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023
(Mariner Books, October 17, 2023)

Perhaps the most overused title for short story anthologies beings with “Best of.” In genre fiction, the heavyweight (in terms of both size and breadth of coverage) was the Gardner Dozois-edited The Year’s Best Science Fiction Stories that ran for 35 years until his death in 2018. And there are a whole slew of similar “Best of’s” for horror, dark fantasy, speculative fiction, you name a subgenre and there’s a “Best of” collection.

If “Best of” is overused for survey anthologies of a year and/or genre, and recognizing that someone’s “best” is someone else’s “meh,” it is probably because a more accurate title of This is Kinda What the Editor Liked More than Others For Whatever Subjective Reasons doesn’t go over well with publisher marketing teams.

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