Good Aftermorneven,
In my last post, I spoke a little bit about one particular piece of writing advice, and made a small mention of writing advice in general. I have a small problem with writing advice, which is to say, I think that writing advice is bunk. Sort of. Let me explain.
With the holidays being so busy and such, Ten Things I Think I Think only has seven entries this week. I’m sure it won’t ruin your Christmas. 🙂 So away we go…
THE BLACK COMPANY IS AN ENDURING CLASSIC
I’ve read Glen Cook’s The Black Company, all the way through, at least three times. It’s about a mercenary company that roams far and wide in a dark fantasy world, varying on the scale of ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys.’ I don’t do Grimdark, but it’s commonly cited as being a foundation of the genre.
Audible had a HUGE sale the start of December, and I picked up almost the entire series on audiobook, at less than $3.50 a book. That’s a pure steal! I listen to audiobooks during my drives, and during my work day. Even as I type blog posts. My mind is good at multi-attention. I wouldn’t have time to read/re-read all the things I listen to.
I’m on book four, and this remains one of the best fantasy series’ I’ve ever read. I feel that the last two books are kind of disappointing, and I slog through them. We’ll see if that’s the case, listening to them. But overall, this is terrific. The latest book, Port of Shadows, is set during the original trilogy, and I am going to read that later this month. But as a whole, I highly recommend The Black Company. Fletcher Vredenburgh did a superb deep dive into the whole thing, over at Black Gate. I also LOVE Cook’s Garrett, PI series, which I wrote about here. Just a great writer.
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Transhuman Space (Steve Jackson Games, March 29, 2018). Illustrated by Christopher Shy
In the 1990s, I made a big decision about tabletop roleplaying gaming: Rather than coming up with my own rules for running games, I ran campaigns using published systems. Some of these used my own original settings; some borrowed settings from published fictional or dramatic works, either as adapted by game publishers or in my own adaptations; and some used published original game worlds. I hardly ever used a setting more than once. But one that I found worth coming back to was David Pulver’s Transhuman Space, a setting for Steve Jackson Games’ game system GURPS.
As its name suggests, Transhuman Space was a science fictional milieu. Tabletop roleplaying has had a lot of these, going back to the classic Traveller, first released in 1977. For a long time, most of them built on the premises of what might be called classic science fiction: The stories of Old Wave authors such as Poul Anderson or Frank Herbert, and of later hard science fiction authors such as Larry Niven, or of the original Star Trek. That is, they were about aliens, robots, supermen, interstellar travel, time travel, parallel worlds, and psionic abilities, singly or in combination.
Transhuman Space does have robots, though they’re quite different from Asimovian robots. But it avoids all those other classic story elements. It has space travel, on an interplanetary (but not interstellar) scale, with human inhabitants from Mercury to the Kuiper Belt — but also with many machines that don’t need life support.
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Clash by Night (Hamlyn Paperbacks, 1980). Cover by Chris Moore
I’m a big fan of the short fiction of Henry Kuttner, one of the great genre pulp writers, and earlier this year I stumbled on a curiosity: a Hamlyn (UK) paperback collection of Kuttner’s pulp tales which has never been reprinted in the US: Clash by Night.
Clash by Night collects five Kuttner tales from the heyday of the science fiction pulps, 1943-1952. The stories collected here were originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, Thrilling Wonder, and Space Science Fiction. They include some of Kuttner’s most acclaimed SF, and some that has been rarely reprinted.
Another thing they all have in common: They were all written with his wife, C.L. Moore, whom the editor didn’t see fit to credit on the cover, for reasons of obvious sexism. It’s small remedy to correct that slight in the title of this article, but I did it anyway.
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Fantasmagoriana Deluxe (Dark Moon Books, November 28, 2023). Cover art by Hellduriel
The history of Fantasmagoriana is rather complicated.
Originally the book was published in German as a ghost story collection, then translated into French in 1812. The first English translation under the title Tales of the Dead by Sarah Elizabeth Utterson appeared in 1813, but Utterson omitted three stories and added one written by herself, “The Storm,” which frankly is an unremarkable, weak imitation of some of the original tales included in the anthology.
The current volume, Fantasmagoriana Deluxe, includes all the stories featured in the two books Fantasmagoriana and Tales of the Dead, some of which were read aloud by Mary Shelley and her friends during the famous party at Villa Diodati (Switzerland) where Lord Byron suggested that the guests try their hand creating some new ghostly fiction. The more famous results of that challenge were Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Vampyre by JW Polidori.
But so much for history. Let’s move to the stories, which are all outstanding.
It seems nearly impossible for even me to believe, but in going through twenty-three years of Black Gate archives, I realized I have never interviewed a medium. Guys who made lamps out of old doll heads? Check. The kid who played “Newt” in Aliens? You betcha. A goth boy band? More times than I can count. But someone who communicates with the dead – for real? Never until now.
I wasn’t aware of what now seems like a glaring oversight on my part, until I made the acquaintance of Ms. DeEtte Ranea at the last show of the spooky season, Days of the Dead. Though in my head I was expecting a much older woman of some vague Slavic descent, likely wearing an earring and a headscarf, DeEtte in no way fit my mental image of a medium, and once I got used to that, I realized I had oodles of questions. DeEtte was gracious enough to agree to answer them and I managed to whittle them down to thirteen, which seemed like an appropriate number given the topic.
So, everyone, please meet DeEtte.
DeEtte, please meet everyone.
Victor Frankenstein (20th Century Fox, 2015)
I really enjoyed this movie. Victor Frankenstein (2015) is an intelligent, well-written, dramatic horror film, a true actor’s film, and so much more than an action-thriller.
Daniel Radcliffe shows off the acting chops I knew he had, from both pre- and post-Harry Potter. James McAvoy is terrific, and once again, the wonderful Charles Dance shows what he can bring to the table. Jessica Brown Findlay adds heart, charm, beauty and class to this production. This film reminded me of the best of the classic Hammer films, but with a bigger budget and state-of-the art special FX, both practical and CGI.
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November-December 2023 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact,
Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Cover art by 123RF, Shutterstock, and Alan M. Clark
This is another great batch of print magazines, with a tale of a failing space colony by Jeff Reynolds (in Analog), an exciting new Quiet War novella by Paul McAuley (in Asimov’s), and a tale of mysterious AIs on a moon of Saturn by Geoff Ryman and David Jeffrey (in F&SF).
The November-December SF magazines are packed with brand new fiction from Gregory Benford, James Patrick Kelly, Ray Nayler, Robert R. Chase, Christopher Rowe, Michael Cassutt, James Sallis, Geoffrey A. Landis, Wendy N. Wagner, Bruce McAllister, Rajnar Vajra, Dominica Phetteplace, Kevin J. Anderson & Rick Wilber, R. K. Duncan, and lots more. See all the details below.
I was posting Shelfies over in a the r/bookshelf subreddit. The Mods seemed to be growing more persnickity, and spam selling posts were getting more common, so I quit the group. I’ve already done a couple posts here at Black Gate with my shelfies from over there. Here’s the third and final one from my Sherlock Holmes shelfies. Links to the prior posts at the end.
I am aware of four sets of annotated Sherlock Holmes. We’ll get to the first two in a bit.
The most recent is The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, from Leslie Klinger. Klinger has gone on to do other major annotations, including for Bran Stoker’s Dracula, and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.
It’s my favorite annotation, and not just because the slipcases are cool as heck. Love the Holmes silhouette. This is a masterfully annotated look at the entire Canon, in the order the stories were printed (you’ll see that’s relevant when I talk about William Baring-Gould’s annotation).
With over almost 1,000 illustrations on high quality paper, it’s a masterpiece. This was Klinger’s second annotation – the first set is to the right of the pic. And it’s different, (and I think better), because it deals with the stories, and the world, in reality.
His second set treats Holmes and Watson as if they were real people, and it’s a different way of annotating. Still neat, but I prefer the New Annotated. It’s a terrific resource, and a fun way to read the stories. One of the treasures of my collection.
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Bloodstone (Warner, March 1975). Cover by Frank Frazetta
“Kane’s power is that of science, not sorcery — although with elder-world science, the distinction becomes blurred. But then, to the untutored minds the distinction is difficult to grasp, for this lies in understanding the forces at work, and in the laws they obey. For example, to produce a deadly sword to wield in battle, a master smith will use secrets of his craft to smelt choice iron into steel, forge steel into tempered blade, then balance, hone and haft the blade to the best of his art. Similarly, a wizard may utilize the secrets of his craft to forge a sword of starfire and incantations. Both swords seem magic to some club-swinging apeman, such as legend places on lands unknown to our civilization, but clearly one is born of science, the other spawned by sorcery…”
—Karl Edward Wagner, Bloodstone
In the hobby of tabletop role-playing games, the influence of J.R.R. Tolkien looms prominently, and the reason for this makes perfect sense: By the mid- to late 1960s, Tolkien fever (i.e., fervent esteem for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) was reaching epic proportions, fueled by the mass market release of affordable paperbacks published by Ballantine Books. “Frodo Lives!” became a counterculture slogan on buttons, bumper stickers, and T-shirts. In the form of graffiti, it was spray-painted in subways and under bridges. Wargaming enthusiasts of the American Midwest were not immune to the hypnotic effect of The Ring, and in one wargame, called Chainmail (Gygax and Perren, 1971), a 15-page “Fantasy Supplement” in the back of the rules proved to be a primary progenitor of the world’s most popular tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons.