Jumping the Shark, Part III

Jumping the Shark, Part III

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Sharknado 6: It’s About Time (The Asylum/Syfy Films, 2018), and Great White (Piccadilly Pictures, 2021)

So, here we go. A new watch-a-thon, this one based on a handful of the 500+ shark movies that I haven’t seen (or gave up on). I’m not holding out much hope for these — shark movies are, on the whole, awful, but I know for a fact that some of these are among the worst films ever made. This 20-film marathon is me just trying to understand why they get made, bought and streamed.

Sharknado 6: It’s About Time (2019) Prime

What kind of shark? Lots of CG sharks and some ropey dinosaurs.

How deep is the plot? 10 meters.

Anyone famous get eaten? Only beans. Hasbeans.

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A to Z Review: Once There Was a Way, by Bryce Zabel

A to Z Review: Once There Was a Way, by Bryce Zabel

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A to Z Reviews

The Beatles were one of the most important bands of the twentieth century, but at the same time, and despite the massive Beatlemania the accompanied them, they only really existed in the public consciousness for eight years and 12 albums. Their breakup in 1970 when they apparently had so much to offer has meant that fans have long wondered what would have happened if they had remained together, had a reunion, anything.

Among those fans are several authors who have written alternative histories in which the Beatles’ story had played out differently. Stephen Baxter tackled the topic in the short story “The Twelfth Album,” Ian R. MacLeod explored a John Lennon who quit the Beatles before they made it in “Snodgrass,” the Beatles went their separate ways during the “Please, Please Me” sessions in Larry Kirwan’s Liverpool Fantasy, and Michael A. Ventrella and Randee Dawn edited an entire anthology of alternate Beatles stories in Across the Universe.  Films, such as Yesterday have also tackled the idea of the Beatles not existing.

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Chess in Sword & Planet Fiction, Part IV: Lin Carter’s Callisto

Chess in Sword & Planet Fiction, Part IV: Lin Carter’s Callisto

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The 8-volume Callisto series by Lin Carter (Dell, 1972-1978). Covers by Vincent DiFate and Ken Kelly

After Burroughs worked chess — in its Martian version of Jetan — into his John Carter series with Chessmen of Mars, it practically became a rule that all later writers of Sword & Planet fiction had to do the same. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, John Norman did it in the Gor series and Ken Bulmer (writing as Alan Burt Akers) did it in the long running Dray Prescot series. I did it too in my 5 book Talera series.

It would be surprising then if Lin Carter didn’t do it. Carter made almost his entire fiction career off following the leads of ERB and REH (Robert E. Howard). And indeed, Carter did invent his own version of chess.

In the last of his 8-book Callisto series, called Renegade of Callisto, Carter pens his own version of ERB’s Chessman of Mars. Although Carter’s main hero in this series is an earthman named Jonathan Dark (Jandar), Dark has — like John Carter before him — recruited and befriended various allies on the moon of Callisto (called Thanator by its natives).

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Merry Christmas from Black Gate

Merry Christmas from Black Gate

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This has been a milestone year for our little website. In 1999 my friend Wayne MacLaurin helped me register the blackgate.com domain, and we launched the site to support our ambitious fantasy magazine. This year we quietly celebrated a quarter-century of continuous operation and quality fantasy coverage, and in the process added several talented newcomers to our small staff of regular bloggers, including Neil Baker, Jeffrey Talanian, Charles Gramlich, William H. Stoddard, and Ian McDowell. We also welcomed back David Soyka, one of our founding bloggers, after a long sabbatical.

Over the past 25 years the site has evolved significantly, and when the print magazine died in 2011 it became our sole focus. Five years later George R.R. Martin presented us with an Alfie Award, and that same year we won a World Fantasy Award, a pair of singular honors I still find a little hard to believe.

Over the long years our focus has changed dramatically. In the early years it was all about growing the site and increasing traffic, and we achieved success I never dreamed of, peaking at over 2 million page views/month. But in the last fifteen years I’ve come to understand that the true rewards of a site like this aren’t in ever-increasing site metrics. They’re in the people I’ve met along the way, and the countless way my own love of the genre has deepened and expanded.

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Of “Dick Merryman” and “a Bad Stink”

Of “Dick Merryman” and “a Bad Stink”

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British Film Institute Box Set of BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas

One of the earliest Christmas ghost stories concludes with dismemberment and a fart joke.

Those familiar with the tradition of telling horror stories at Yuletide rather than Halloween may associate it with the late 19th and early 20th century, as those decades are considered the golden age of the traditional English ghost story, which despite its cozy label, includes tales as gruesome as anything by Lovecraft.

But it is referenced in Britain as early as 1623, with Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, in which Act 2 opens with Mamillius, the young son of Queen Hermione of Sicily, starting to tell his mother and her ladies-in-waiting a Yuletide story of “sprites and goblins” and “a man who dwelt by a churchyard.” Before he can get past that sentence, soldiers burst in accusing his mother of infidelity, and the boy, who seems to be around six or seven, is dragged offstage, to die there of shock and heartbreak. Shakespeare being Shakespeare, his play then becomes a romantic comedy.

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A Holmes Christmas Carol

A Holmes Christmas Carol

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Just about everyone is familiar with A Christmas Carol. The first short movie was made in 1901, based on a play adapted from Charles Dickens’ novel. And there were new adaptations this year. THAT is enduring.

I’ve seen different word counts, but Dickens’ work is about 29,000 words long. That’s a very short novel. But, as with any adaptation, some things are left out.

I took Dickens’ original novel – not one of the movie versions – and rewrote it as a Sherlock Holmes tale. I include some text from Dickens, and some stuff I’m not familiar with from just watching the movies.

I have about a half-dozen published Holmes short stories, and I think that I voice Watson, and emulate Doyle, fairly well. Well enough to give my stuff a try, I feel. And in this one, I feel like I presented some depth to Holmes, but I also remained faithful to Doyle’s actual character.

So, give it a read.

I

It is with a certain sense of misgiving that I relate the following tale, which took place during the Christmas season in 1902. I had moved out of our Baker Street lodgings earlier that year, having married only a few months before. I had rooms in Queen Anne Street and was quite busy with my flourishing medical practice. A newly married man, I once again found myself as head of a household, with all of the duties thereof. I saw Holmes infrequently, but had found the time to stop by the day before Christmas. Knowing he would have no plans of any kind, I extended to him an invitation to join my wife and I for Christmas day.

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Barry N. Malzberg, July 24, 1939 – December 19, 2024

Barry N. Malzberg, July 24, 1939 – December 19, 2024

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Barry Malzberg in 2009

Barry Malzberg died Thursday, December 19, 2024, at the age of 85. I never met Barry in person, but I knew him through correspondence — much of it on an email list, but also some personal email — for at least a quarter century. But I knew him as an author for far longer. When I was first buying books from the local drugstore, at the age of 14 or so, I bought a great many of his novels, slim paperbacks off the spinner rack. I confess that I bought the first one in part because it was 95 cents, and other books on the rack were $1.25. But I was immediately taken with his voice, one of the most recognizable voices in SF at that time, and I kept buying his books.

Malzberg was born in New York City on July 24, 1939. He was an avid reader of SF throughout the 1950s. He attended Syracuse, graduating in 1960 and returning in 1964 to study creative writing (fellow students included Joyce Carol Oates and Harvey Jacobs.) He received fellowships in creative writing and in playwriting, but had no success selling to literary magazines. He took a job with the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, and began selling stories to men’s magazine and SF magazines, as well as novels in various genres, including erotica.

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A Singular Success: Fat City

A Singular Success: Fat City

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I hold people who write novels in awe. Because writing an entire book-length story is something that I could never do in a million years, I even have a measure of admiration and respect for people who write mediocre novels, so you can imagine how I feel about someone who writes a beautiful novel, a brilliant novel, a great novel; you can imagine how I feel about Leonard Gardner.

“Leonard Gardner — who’s that? I’ve never heard of him.” Well, I’m here to tell you that Leonard Gardner should be a household name, because he wrote one of the finest, most moving novels that has appeared during my lifetime; Leonard Gardner wrote Fat City.

Fat City is set in the waning days of 1959, in Stockton, California, and it chronicles the lives of two small-time boxers. Billy Tully is at the end of his career, newly divorced, washed-up and drifting into alcoholism as he moves from one seedy hotel to another, filling his days with melancholy reverie and back-breaking farm jobs. Ernie Munger is just starting out, working at a gas station during the day and fighting in four round prelims at night to support his new wife, whom he married because he’d gotten her pregnant. Billy and Ernie both dream of glory, but there is no big time here, no Fat City of wealth, fame, and success — just limited young men who win or lose for a few dollars and piss blood for weeks afterward. Ernie, still fresh and hopeful, feels “the potent allegiance of fate,” but his arc will inevitably be the same as Billy’s; the time and place and his own lack of internal resources guarantee it.

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A to Z Review: “Iron Monk,” by Melissa Yuan-Innes

A to Z Review: “Iron Monk,” by Melissa Yuan-Innes

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A to Z Reviews

Melissa Yuan-Innes sets her story “Iron Monk” on a spaceship traveling to the asteroid belt. Appearing in the May-June 2010 issue of Interzone. The crew of the spaceship seems an odd lot and it is eventually explained that they were selected by the Chinese government to go on what may very well be a suicide mission to make contact with aliens who have been discovered in Earth’s asteroid belt.

Told from the point of view of a monk who is on the trip, it is clear that unity among the crew of six was not an important concern for the people who put the mission together. The monk quietly lusts for the ship’s physician, thinks the etymologist is crazy, has little to do with one of the other crew members and actively avoids Hunan, who he believes is an agent of the government. The only crew member who he interacts with is a young boy named Little Tiger, who he trains in martial arts.

 

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Goth Chick News: The Christmas Cat, the Yule Lads, Troll Couples and Other Terrifying Christmas Legends

Goth Chick News: The Christmas Cat, the Yule Lads, Troll Couples and Other Terrifying Christmas Legends

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Another masterpiece by Emi Boz

It all started with Big Cheese John O’s Facebook post in which he tagged me on a painting of a Yule Cat by Emi Boz [Macabre Cabaret Artist]. True, I love pretty much everything Boz does, but that’s not the reason J.O. tagged me. Instead he was commenting on how I had warned him about the Yule Cat. Actually, this legend is one of the many which are referenced in The Dead of Winter, a new holiday release I wrote about a couple weeks back, so technically I did warn him. But it made me want to know more about the Yule Cat — welcome to the deep dark hole in the frozen ground, into which I have just descended researching this.

It starts with the Yule Lads.

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