Black Gate – Page 387 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Black Gate Book Club, Downbelow Station, Fourth Discussion

Wednesday, June 27, 2018 Adrian Simmons Comments 6 comments

Welcome back to the Black Gate Book Club! We are rapidly closing in on C.J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station (DbS). You can get to speed with the first, second, and third rounds.

Adrian S.

Fourth round!

Okay, page 285 and Fletcher, you are right that things are (finally) happening quick. The Union Fleet has dropped into the system, and the Company Fleet and the militia go out to meet them. I like the idea that all the ships look the same on scan, whether they are jump-capable merchanters or in-system merchanters, or Fleet Carriers or whatever—they all look the same until they maneuver or start to fire.

Jon Lukas has become the bad guy that he was hinted at with a full murderous take-over of Downbelow Station. Of course, he’s made a choice on which side he’s on, gambling that the Union is going to win, and from there getting roped into helping Union win. This puts him with a lot of targets on his back.

Kressich is in the exact same boat, but with more targets on his back, he’s terrified of his people in Q, and terrified of his own security, but once the shooting starts, he is one of the few people who has security and has people.

The relationship of the “leaders” to their armies/militias is interesting.

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The Wonderful Adventures of “Mr. Jones,” the Electric Man

Wednesday, June 27, 2018 Steve Carper Comments 0 Comment

A special treat this time: a lost robot story that nobody has seen for more than a century.

Supernatural tales, ghost stories, odd occurrences, mysterious disappearances, and bizarre inventions all found a home in The Black Cat, a magazine founded in 1895, a year before the first pulp magazine appeared. Mike Ashley calls it “a spiritual ancestor to Weird Tales.” The stories were proto-genre, a mixture of what then got called “unusual” stories, a term that must have had more currency in the 19th century. It was founded by 44-year-old Herman Daniel Umbstaetter, who went by the initials H. D. Not content with being editor and publisher, he seeded the magazine with his own stories, some under pseudonyms, until it took off on its own. Covers were illustrated by his much younger wife Nelly, usually with some variation of the stylized black cat staring spookily out at the reader that appeared from from the first issue.

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Birthday Reviews: Mary Rosenblum’s “Night Wind”

Wednesday, June 27, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Mary Rosenblum was born on June 27, 1952. She was killed when the small plane she was flying crashed on March 11, 2018. She wrote mystery novels under her maiden name, Mary Freeman.

Rosenblum’s 1994 novel The Drylands won the Compton Brook Stephen Tall Memorial Award for best first novel. In 2009 her short story “Sacrifice” received the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. Her novella “Gas Fish” was a Hugo Award nominee and “One Good Juror” made the shortlist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Two of her stories, “Rat” and “The Eye of God” were considered for the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award.

Rosenblum sold “Night Wind” to Deborah J. Ross for inclusion in the anthology Lace and Blade. The story has never been reprinted, although Rosenblum’s “Dragon Wind” appeared in the second Lace and Blade anthology. “Night Wind” was a nominee for the Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 2009.

“Night Wind” is set in a Renaissance period Spain where magic can be passed down from father to son. Alvaro is the scion of a noble line, but his father’s magical power has been taken from him and Alvaro does not have any magic of his own, a situation the family is trying to hide. Having studied at university with the great scholar Delarentario, Alvaro has returned to his ancestral estates where his mother is trying to forge a marriage alliance with the merchant Salvaria. Along the way, Alvaro is accosted by the brigand Night Wind.

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Experience the Terrors of the Mythos in the Old West in Down Darker Trails

Tuesday, June 26, 2018 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

One of the many things I love about the Call of Cthulhu RPG — besides the prospect of gathering with close friends to cheerfully go insane together — is the rich array of settings. The core game is set in 1930s America, where Lovecraft (who died in 1937) set virtually all of his fiction, and that serves the pulp horror aesthetic nicely. But over the years Chaosium, and other publishers, have produced several top-notch supplements giving players the option to adventure in a wide range of times and places.

These include Cthulhu Now (1987), Terror Australis (1987), King of Chicago (1992), The Cairo Guidebook (1995), Atomic-Age Cthulhu (2013), and many, many more. The Dreamlands, Victorian London, Scotland, even the Orient Express… no other game invites you to go stark, raving mad in such finely detailed surroundings.

However, CoC has been sorely lacking a weird western sourcebook, so I was very pleased to see Kevin Ross and his friends at Chaosium release Down Darker Trails, a massive full-color 256-page hardcover which lovingly brings Mythos horror to the old west. The book is an excellent addition to Chaosium’s catalog, and contains a splendid historical re-telling of the American Territories, plenty of famous individuals, two complete towns, four western-themed Lost Worlds (including the weird subterranean world of K’n-yan, and the eerie Shadow Desert), and two complete introductory adventures.

Down Darker Trails invites you to play American Indian heroes and famous gunslingers, visit famous sites, and discover just how deeply the terror and mystery of the Great Old Ones has seeped into the West.

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A Decadal Review of Science Fiction from November 1969: Wrap-up

Tuesday, June 26, 2018 Adrian Simmons Comments 0 Comment

America, 1969

For the initial round of the quatro-decadal review, I read and reviewed six periodicals, in the following order:

Amazing Stories, November 1969
Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1969
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1969
Worlds of If, November 1969
Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, November 1969
Venture Science Fiction, November 1969

All of the magazines had fiction and review sections, but not all had artwork, editorials, or letter sections or science articles. A table is called for!

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Birthday Reviews: James Van Pelt’s “The Inn at Mount Either”

Tuesday, June 26, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 2 comments

James Van Pelt was born on June 26, 1954.

In 1999 Van Pelt was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Van Pelt received a Nebula Award nomination for his Short Story “The Last of the O-Forms.”

“The Inn at Mount Either” originally appeared in the May 2005 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, edited by Stanley Schmidt. Rich Horton included it in Science Fiction The Best of the Year 2006 Edition. Van Pelt selected the story for his own collection The Radio Magician and Other Stories, published by Fairwood Press in 2009. The story finished second in the Analog Readers’ Poll and was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

“The Inn at Mount Either” is a sprawling resort with doorways that provide access to alternative worlds, a complex arrangement which means that the resort employees dissuade their guests from exploring on their own. Despite that, the security at the facility seems farcical and the guests are not actually warned of the resort’s true nature.

Dorian Wallace approaches the concierge because his wife, Stephanie, has been missing for a full day. Despite the oddities and dangers of the lodge, the concierge is neither concerned nor helpful, indicating that they don’t consider someone missing until they’ve been gone for 48 hours, although later developments should indicate that concern should happen immediately, or after two hours at the outside.

Unable to get help, Dorian goes off in search of his wife, remembering how taken she was by the doorway to Polynesia they had seen earlier. Naturally enough, he gets lost in the convoluted structure and passes through some of the doorways, experiencing a variety of alternatives the lodge looks out upon.

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Future Treasures: Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio

Monday, June 25, 2018 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

I’m definitely in the mood for an immersive, baroque space opera, with aliens, mystery, epic space battles, and even space gladiators. Wait, space gladiators?

Well, I’m not inclined to be picky right now so, sure, bring on the space gladiators. They’re a major part of Christopher Ruocchio’s debut novel Empire of Silence, the opening volume of The Sun Eater, which Eric Flint calls “epic-scale space opera in the tradition of Dune.” It arrives in hardcover from DAW next month.

Hadrian Marlowe, a man revered as a hero and despised as a murderer, chronicles his tale in th galaxy-spanning debut of the Sun Eater series, merging the best of space opera and epic fantasy.

It was not his war.

The galaxy remembers him as a hero: the man who burned every last alien Cielcin from the sky. They remember him as a monster: the devil who destroyed a sun, casually annihilating four billion human lives — even the Emperor himself — against Imperial orders.

But Hadrian was not a hero. He was not a monster. He was not even a soldier.

On the wrong planet, at the right time, for the best reasons, Hadrian Marlowe starts down a path that can only end in fire. He flees his father and a future as a torturer only to be left stranded on a strange, backwater world.

Forced to fight as a gladiator and navigate the intrigues of a foreign planetary court, Hadrian must fight a war he did not start, for an Empire he does not love, against an enemy he will never understand.

Christopher Ruocchio is the co-editor (with Tony Daniel) of the new Baen anthology Star Destroyers, and (with Hank Davis) the upcoming Space Pioneers.

Empire of Silence will be published by DAW Books on July 3, 2018. It is 624 pages, priced at $26 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Sam Weber, who also painted the cover to Medusa Uploaded and Ken Liu’s The Wall of Storms.

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Norbert Davis’ Ben Shaley

Monday, June 25, 2018 Bob Byrne Comments 6 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 Chandlers’ The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

Like many pulpsters, Norbert Davis wrote for several different markets, such as westerns, romance and war stories. But he was at his best in the private eye and mystery field. Davis could write standard hardboiled fare, but he excelled at mixing humor into the genre, and many argue he did it better than anyone else.

Joe ‘Cap’ Shaw, legendary editor of Black Mask, didn’t feel that Davis’ hardboiled humor fit in to the magazine and the writer only managed to break into Black Mask five times between 1932 and 1937. Davis had success in other markets, however, with eighteen stories seeing print in 1936, for example. And several stories appeared in Black Mask after Shaw departed.

Ben Shaley appeared in the February and April, 1934 issues of Black Mask and represent two of the five Davis stories that Shaw chose to print.

Shaley was a Los Angeles PI introduced in “Red Goose.” I like Davis’ description: ‘Shaley was bonily tall. He had a thin, tanned face with bitterly heavy lines in it. He looked calm; but he looked like he was being calm on purpose – as though he was consciously holding himself in. He had an air of hardboiled confidence.’

The humor that Davis is best known for is pretty much absent from this story, but that proves he could hold his own writing ‘straight’ hardboiled. Though Shaley’s exasperation with the nerdy museum curator, as the detective tries to lay the groundwork for the case is amusing.

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Birthday Reviews: Charles Sheffield’s “Marconi, Mattin, Maxwell”

Monday, June 25, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 1 comment

Cover by Bonnie Dalzell

Charles Sheffield was born on June 25, 1935 and died on November 2, 2002. On two occasions, he published fiction under the name James Kirkwood when he had multiple stories appearing in a single issue of a magazine.

In 1979 Sheffield was a nominee for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He went on to win the Hugo and Nebula Award for his novelette “Georgia on My Mind.” His novel Brother to Dragons won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and his novel The McAndrew Chronicles received the Seiun Award. In 1998 Sheffield served as Toastmaster at Bucconeer, the Worldcon in Baltimore. From 1998 until his death, Sheffield was married to author Nancy Kress.

“Marconi, Mattin, Maxwell” was first published in the May 1977 issue of Galaxy, edited by James Baen. Sheffield included it in his 1979 collection Vectors. The story kicked off a series of ten short stories featuring Henry Carver and Waldo Burmeister, two lawyers in the future. In 2001, Sheffield collected all of the stories in Space Suits: Being the Selected Legal Papers of Waldo Burmeister and Henry Carver, Attorneys-at-Law, as Transcribed and Edited by Henry Carver, LL.B., and With a Special Introduction by Waldo P. Burmeister, LL.B. The story was also translated into German in 1980 for an appearance in Science-Fiction-Stories 80, edited by Walter Spiegl.

In “Marconi, Mattin, Maxwell,” Henry Carver is relating his relationship with the great inventor Gerald Mattin. The story is set up as a letter to an editor who is including a chapter about Mattin in a book about great scientists. Carver indicates that the letter provides the editor with the true story of Mattin rather than the sanitized version that Carver wrote for the book.

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Vintage Treasures: Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois’ 40-Volume Reprint Library

Sunday, June 24, 2018 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

The impending release of Gardner Dozois’ 35th and final Year’s Best anthology next month brings us to the end of an era. Hard as it is to believe, after his final books are released in the next few months, there will be no more magazines, stories or anthologies from one of the most gifted editors the field has ever seen.

Many readers are unaware that, as prolific as Gardner was as a magazine and Year’s Best editor — 17 years at the helm of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and 35 years as the editor of the annual Year’s Best Science Fiction — his greatest contribution to the field, at least in terms of raw numbers, was as an editor of standalone anthologies. He produced many dozens, including 21 volumes collecting stories from Asimov’s, such as Isaac Asimov’s Detectives (1998) and Isaac Asimov’s Halloween (2001), most co-edited with Sheila Williams.

But his most fruitful partnership was with Jack Dann, which whom he co-edited some 40 themed science fiction and fantasy anthologies between 1976 and 2009, almost all paperback originals with Ace Books. These included 22 volumes in the Exclamatory Series, called that because the anthologies had one-word titles with an exclamation point, like Magicats! (1984), Bestiary! (1985), and Invaders! (1993), and an additional 18 themed reprint volumes, such as Armageddons (1999), Aliens Among Us (2000), and A.I.s (2004).

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