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

Comments 12 comments


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.

…

Read More Read More

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

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

Comments 0 Comment
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!

…

Read More Read More

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

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

Comments 1 comment

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.

…

Read More Read More

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

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

Comments 2 comments

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.

…

Read More Read More

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

Comments 11 comments


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.

…

Read More Read More

The New Haven Incident – Part One

The New Haven Incident – Part One

Comments 2 comments

Good afterevenmorn!

I know it’s silly greeting, but I’m overly fond of it. Moving swiftly on…

I was struggling with what to write for my usual fortnightly post, and so decided that I’ll instead share some of my writing (thanks to the editors for letting me be lazy this time around!). It’s hopefully a win-win. I don’t have to think this fortnight, and you, with luck, get something entertaining.

If I were to give this an elevator pitch, it would be something like: It’s Resident Evil… but with fairies.

Look, the premise is silly as hell, but I had so much fun writing it (also, I’ve not played any of the R.E. games. I did watch Jacksepticeye play through Resident Evil: The Village, though, so that counts… right?). I hope that translates when people read it. In any case, please enjoy the first part of the weekly serial story. It goes up on my personal blog every Friday, and we’re currently on part seven, so if you’re hard up for some entertainment of a Friday, there’s at least something to occupy some ten to fifteen minutes of it! Anyway, enough with the promo stuff. Here’s the story.

…

Read More Read More

Triangulating Moving Targets: Equimedian

Triangulating Moving Targets: Equimedian

Comments 0 Comment


Equimedian (Hex Publishers, February 6, 2024). Cover artist unknown

When we first meet Jason Velez, the protagonist of my alternative-1970s novel about science fiction, fandom, and the unskeining of reality itself, he’s in a bad way. By the end of Equimedian’s first chapter, he enumerates seven things he wants to change in his life. The list kicks off with a call to action to sell off the bulk of his SF paperbacks. The reasons Jason offers seem straightforward enough: he needs cash, and he’s tired of hauling around thousands of books.

But is there more to it than that?

…

Read More Read More

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: John D. MacDonald’s ‘Ring Around the Redhead’

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: John D. MacDonald’s ‘Ring Around the Redhead’

Comments 10 comments

“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)

I’m putting the finishing touches on my long-delayed Jo Gar essay. But I realized I’ve not talked about my all-time favorite author yet here in A (Black) Gat in the Hand. I have written about a half-dozen essays on John D. MacdDonald, and I included Bill Crider’s review of The Brass Cupcake.

But I haven’t included any of his stuff in my Pulp column. Though he achieved fame as a paperback writer, John MacD honed his skills as a prolific Pulpster. He was a regular in Doc Savage in 1946, before breaking into both Dime Detective, and Black Mask, the following year. He became a regular in the sci-fi Pulps, and even contributed to the Mystery Pulp successors, Manhunt, and the (short-lived) Justice. Black Mask’s famed editor, Joe ‘Cap’ Shaw was MacDonald’s agent for a time.

Back in 2016, I wrote a detailed piece on MacDonald for the 100th anniversary of his birth. Click on over if you want to learn some things about him. Back in 2018,I guested in Steve H Silver’s Birthday Reviews column, with a rare science fiction post by me. So, bringing that one over here into the Pulp column to get some JDM here. More to come (though not sci-fi).

Every so often, I prove that the Black Gate firewall needs some serious tightening up by jumping in and putting up a post where I don’t belong (many readers and fellow bloggers believe that would be the entirety of the Black Gate website…). So, if you’re reading this, the crack web monitoring team hasn’t seen it yet. Don’t tell Steven. He might gnaw through the restraining chain around his ankle and crawl over to my desk in the cellar…basement…journalist’s suite to thrash me.

…

Read More Read More

Christopher Moore and His Very Dirty Job

Christopher Moore and His Very Dirty Job

Comments 3 comments

When talking about banning books, nobody mentions Christopher Moore. No doubt Moore is upset about this, because he’s out to offend pretty much everybody. The fact that he does this with glee, panache, and massive gobs of bathroom humor probably doesn’t signify, and certainly won’t save his neck when the book-banning trolls finally come for him. The fact is, he’s funny, and there’s nothing the book-banners hate more than a healthy sense of the absurd.

An excellent case in point is Moore’s A Dirty Job, in which unassuming Charlie Asher, a second-hand dealer in San Francisco, becomes a “death merchant,” a sort of dogsbody for Death, who, it seems, has left the field, possibly never to return. It’s Charlie’s job to match dying people with their “soul vessel,” usually some knick-knack or other with sentimental value, in part so that the dead can find rest, and in part to prevent Orcus, lurking in the sewers, from eating up the soul vessels and rising again to usher in an age of darkness and doom.

That’s right, Orcus. Our old friend from the original AD&D Monster Manual. Etc.

…

Read More Read More

I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie, Part I

I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie, Part I

Comments 3 comments

Arachnicide (See Thru Pictures, 2014)

I’m sometimes asked why I haven’t got around to watching Oppenheimer or Killers of the Flower Moon yet, and that’s because I’m too busy watching this sort of stuff. Come with me as we begin our foray into the world of angry insects!

Arachnicide (2014, YouTube)

Giant bugs?

You have to wait for around 53 minutes for anything with more than 2 legs to show up.

CGI-heavy?

CGI HEAVY, as in ALL CG, including the environments, landscapes, helicopters, soldiers walking to helicopters, satellites, and the giant spiders.

…

Read More Read More