Vintage Treasures: A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski

Vintage Treasures: A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski

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A Door Into Ocean (Avon, February 1987). Cover by Line

Joan Slonczewski’s first novel, Still Forms on Foxfield, was published in 1980, but it was their second novel, A Door Into Ocean, which made a real splash, winning the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (not to be confused with the old Campbell Award for Best New Writer, now called the Astounding Award, on account of Campbell being a racist goofball.)

Slonczewski is referred to as ‘she’ and ‘her’ on virtually every bio and interview I’ve found on the web — including the Kenyon College faculty page where Slonczewski is a Chair of Biology — but their website and Wikipedia page give their pronouns as they, them, theirs, so that’s what I’ll use here.

A Door Into Ocean was the book that made readers sit up and take notice of Slonczewski. They followed it with three more books in what became known as the Elysium Cycle: Daughter of Elysium (1993), The Children Star (1998), and Brain Plague (2000). Often compared to Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, A Door into Ocean explores a colony planet covered entirely by water, occupied by an all-female offshoot of humanity who have become skilled genetic engineers.

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Godzilla Minus One Is One of the Crowning Achievements of the Series

Godzilla Minus One Is One of the Crowning Achievements of the Series

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godzilla-minus-one

The Godzilla franchise turns seventy next year, and 2023 has been chock-full of new G-media to get everyone amped. Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. and Godzilla 2000: Millennium got special theatrical re-releases. Shigeru Kayama’s original novelizations of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again were finally published in English translations. AppleTV produced Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, a new episodic series based on Legendary’s Monsterverse. Toho released new short Godzilla films with the famous monster smacking around Gigan and Megalon in old-school grudge matches.

The biggest gift arrives this weekend: Godzilla Minus One, Toho’s first live-action film since 2016’s Shin Godzilla. And what a gorgeous, furious, thrilling, tear-stained gift it is. It’s a fitting anniversary homage to the creators of the 1954 classic, especially original director Ishiro Honda, and easily one of the best Godzilla films—and best giant monster films—ever made. It places Godzilla into a period setting for the first time and fills the screen with exciting kaiju terror and an engrossing human story that doesn’t exist just to string along the spectacle. This is the Godzilla film that conventional wisdom says couldn’t be made. Yet here it is … because conventional wisdom is rarely genuine wisdom. 

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Units of Conviction: Being Michael Swanwick

Units of Conviction: Being Michael Swanwick

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Being Michael Swanwick (Fairwood Press, November 21, 2023)

Prolificity is in the DNA of science fiction. H. G. Wells, whose most famous works date back to the 1890s, wrote some fifty novels, seventy non-fiction books, and one hundred short stories. Pick almost any SFWA Grand Master and you’ll encounter a bibliography that will engulf your life for many months, if not years. How many shelves to house the hundreds of books published, for instance, by Andre Norton, or Poul Anderson, or Michael Moorcock, or Jane Yolen?

A great many of the field’s best-known writers were, and in some cases still are, not just highly productive, but visibly so. The running tally of Isaac Asimov’s books was widely publicized and known — David Letterman, for instance, said on national television in 1980, “My next guest’s most recent published work is his two hundred and twenty-first book” — and many notable genre names remained in the spotlight because they always seemed to have a new book in the offing, frequently writing across genres or penning long-running series.

Within the cadre of esteemed, award-winning authors, there’s a subset that I tend to think of as covertly prolific. Oftentimes, they publish somewhere between a handful and a dozen novels throughout their careers, which by the standards of mainstream literature would be commendable but within science fiction doesn’t quicken anyone’s pulse.

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Goth Chick News: Saying Farewell to Another ‘Season’ at Days of the Dead

Goth Chick News: Saying Farewell to Another ‘Season’ at Days of the Dead

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That time of year has once again rolled around and another official spooky season is in the rearview mirror. Black Gate photog Chris Z has thrown a tarp over the Hummer and sent his kilt to the dry cleaners. We’ve emptied the final airplane-sized bottles of Fireball and filed our last expense report with BG’s financial fun police. As it has been for the past 11 years, the weekend before Thanksgiving means we attend the final convention of our annual show circuit, Days of the Dead.

It certainly doesn’t feel like that long since we attended our first DotD convention at its sophomore outing in the Chicago suburbs. I readily admit that Chicago isn’t Los Angeles or even New Orleans when it comes to subcultures, though the elements that do exist are certainly worth wading into if you know where to look. But when DotD came to Chicago for the first time in 2011, its home was the Schaumburg Marriott of all places.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Ashes of Time

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Ashes of Time

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Ashes of Time (Hong Kong, 1994/2008)

Chinese director Wong Kar-wai, whose films are visually intense, almost hallucinogenic, had a long-time love of the wuxia genre, and in the early ‘90s, when he was having trouble raising money for his production company, he agreed to make a historical martial arts film based on the classic Condor Heroes stories. Excited by the story but wanting it to be perfect, he spent almost three years on the project, but the result was Ashes of Time (1994), one of the most beautiful films ever to come out of Chinese cinema.

However, Wong nearly broke himself (and his cast) in making it, so he took a break to produce a spirited parody of the Condor Heroes story with essentially the same cast, The Eagle Shooting Heroes (1993), also covered below. It’s a hoot. Finally, I’ve added the undeservedly obscure Journey to the Western Xia Empire (1996), which though shot in the same western Chinese wastes as Ashes of Time is a different visual experience entirely.

And with that, we’re at the end of the ‘90s wuxia film boom, so next time, it’s back to classic swashbucklers!

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David Guy Compton, August 19, 1930 — November 10, 2023

David Guy Compton, August 19, 1930 — November 10, 2023

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Farewell, Earth’s Bliss (Ace Books, 1971), Synthajoy (Berkley Books, September 1979), and
Ascendancies (Ace, January 1985). Covers by Reginald Lloyd, Richard Powers, and Barclay Shaw

I learned this week that David Guy Compton died on November 10. He was born on August 19, 1930, in London, the child of two actors. He lived to the age of 93.

He wrote SF as “D. G. Compton,” mysteries as “Guy Compton,” romance novels as “Frances Lynch,” and also radio plays, some non-fiction (including a book about stuttering), and some non-genre books, including his last, a semi-autobiographical novel called So Here’s Our Leo, from 2022.

He had his greatest success with his science fiction, especially a dozen novels published between 1965 and 1980, of which the best known is The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1974), published in the US as The Unsleeping Eye, and made into a well-regarded movie, Death Watch (1980), directed by Bernard Tavernier. But all of these novels were provocative and original — really unlike what anyone else was doing. I particularly recommend Farewell, Earth’s Bliss (1966), The Steel Crocodile (1970), and Ascendancies (1980).

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Cass Blue

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Cass Blue

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I’ve got another introduction out for Steeger Books. I got to jump in for Volume Two of John Lawrence’s tough PI, Cass Blue. Here’s that intro, to whet your appetite. If you like what you read, check out the two books. I hadn’t read Blue before writing this intro, and I enjoyed discovering these stories.

Cass Blue presented an unusual combination to the readers of Dime Detective when he arrived in November of 1932 in “The Bloodstone.” The settings of the first three stories were more akin to an Agatha Christie novel than to the pages of a hardboiled pulp magazine. The country manor; the island only reachable by boat; a houseful of suspects – and potential victims. But there were also those elements of the Weird Menace pulps. What’s a country house without a seance? Need a masked assailant? – Check. Murder by mad bomber? Of course!

In addition to the Christie-esque setting and the Weird Menace tone, Blue himself is a tough guy that Roger Torrey or Frederick Nebel might have written. It’s a different type of Pulp Stew than readers were used to in Dime Detective when Blue became a regular in 1934.

Story four – “Calling All Cars” – involved a big heist caper and a serial killer. It was different from the first three, but still not the usual private eye yarn. It had a pretty big scope. You can find those first four stories in Volume One, also from Steeger Books. It also includes an excellent intro by Ed Hulse, looking at the history of Dime Detective.

This second volume starts a little more traditionally with “Guilty Party” from the August 15, 1935 issue of Dime Detective. “Calling All Cars” had been in the prior issue, only two weeks before. Blue is walking home, pleased that his private detective business has lasted for eight years – with Blue still alive to enjoy it. A harmless-looking fellow is following him through a snowstorm, and Blue figures it’s a stool pigeon looking to sell some info.

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Mission to the Mesozoic: The Shores of Kansas by Robert Chilson

Mission to the Mesozoic: The Shores of Kansas by Robert Chilson

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The Shores of Kansas (Popular Library, March 1976). Cover by Mariano

Here’s another in my series of reviews of fairly obscure books from the ’70s and ’80s. Like some others, this review is of a book I bought at the Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention in Lombard, IL, earlier this year.

Rob Chilson is a Kansas City based writer (though born in Oklahoma) whose first story appeared in Analog in 1968. (Likely he is one of the few John W. Campbell discoveries still alive, though I think Donald Kingsbury, who is 94 and whose first story was in Astounding in 1952, remains the senior among that group.) His first stories and novels, including this one, were published as by Robert Chilson, though by the mid-80s he was using Rob.

I’ve known Rob for a number of years, seeing him most often at the KC convention ConQuesT. I saw him most recently at the World Fantasy Convention, which was in Kansas City this year, where he was kind enough to sign this very book for me. He’s a fine writer, and I’ve enjoyed his short fiction for a long time, with notable stories including “This Side of Independence,” “Farmers in the Sky,” “The Conquest of the Air,” and a series of stories set 60,000,000 years in the future, called collectively “Prime Mondeign.” (The most recent of these is “The Tarn,” from Analog in 2015.)

I had not read any of his novels until I recently tried his first, As the Curtain Falls, also set in the very distant future. It had interesting aspects, but ultimately I felt it didn’t quite work, and it was clearly a first novel that probably could have used another revision. I’m happy to report that The Shores of Kansas, his third novel, from 1976, is much better.

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Vintage Treasures: The Bard Series by Keith Taylor

Vintage Treasures: The Bard Series by Keith Taylor

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Bard, Volumes I-IV (Ace Books, 1981-97). Covers by Don Maitz

In October 1975 an unknown author named Dennis More made his debut in Fantastic magazine with “Fugitives in Winter,” the rousing tale of Felimid mac Fal of Eire, a bard whose tools are his ancient harp Golden Singer, and his magic sword, Kincaid. Eight more tales of Felimid followed, in places like Fantastic, Weird Tales, and Andrew Offutt’s Swords Against Darkness.

‘Dennis More,’ as it turned out, was Australian writer Keith Taylor, who began writing under his own name with the story “Hungry Grass” in Swords Against Darkness V (1979). In 1981 Taylor collected four of his early Felimid stories  — along with a brand new novella — in the fix up novel Bard, which Fletcher Vredenburgh called “a perfect artifact from the glory days of 1970s swords & sorcery.” It spawned a long-running series that lasted five volumes (with rumors of a sixth in the pipeline).

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Cruel Yule: The Star Wars Holiday Special and Other Abominations

Cruel Yule: The Star Wars Holiday Special and Other Abominations

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Yes, the desperate search for the table leaf that you chucked into the garage this time last year is over, the turkey that began so hopefully as a young bird just pecking its way out of its shell to greet the gentle breeze and cerulean blue sky is now a masticated mass working its way through your digestive system on its way to an ignominious end (yours!), and every available inch of table and counter space in your kitchen has disappeared under an avalanche of greasy plates and silverware.

My, that was fun, wasn’t it? And you know what that means, don’t you? — it’s almost Christmas!

In addition to the common cultural practices of the season (like sticking an actual tree in your living room, for goodness’ sake), every family has their own peculiar holiday rites and rituals. As I detailed for breathless Black Gate readers many years ago, one of mine is reading a classic ghost story aloud on Christmas Eve, a practice I heartily commend to anyone willing to give it a try. However, if that’s a bit too nineteenth century for you (the effect is largely lost if you’re reading off of an iPhone), I have another, more modern-feeling tradition that might interest you. The only thing is, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Around here we call it… Cruel Yule.

To Hell With It

Countless families look forward to the Christmas season because it provides an occasion for watching their favorite holiday movies, timeless films like Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life, and A Christmas Story. Heartwarming, uplifting, classic treats for all ages they truly are… and I say, the hell with ’em.

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