I Loved This Book: Being Michael Swanwick, by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

I Loved This Book: Being Michael Swanwick, by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

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

Back in 2001 Michael Swanwick published a collection of interviews with his close friend, sometime mentor and collaborator, and fellow Philadelphian Gardner Dozois, called Being Gardner Dozois. That book focused on Dozois’s short fiction. And now Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, an accomplished writer of short SF himself, and a Hugo nominee for his 2016 collection of conversations with Robert Silverberg, Traveler of Worlds, has now published Being Michael Swanwick, a collection of interviews with Swanwick. This book covers essentially all of Swanwick’s short stories — which is pretty remarkable as he is quite prolific.

The book is organized chronologically, in five-year chunks, beginning in 1980, when Swanwick’s first stories, “Ginungagap” and “The Feast of Saint Janis,” appeared. I remember the excitement at the time about the Special Science Fiction Issue of the prestigious literary magazine TriQuarterly, and the surprise that a brand-new writer had a story (“Ginnungagap”) in it, amidst heavyweights like Le Guin, Wolfe, Delany, and Disch. Obviously the judgment of the editors has been vindicated — Swanwick would perhaps blush to read this, but his fiction fully stands with those great writers, and he is also clearly a writer of considerable literary merit, but also a writer who loves SF and Fantasy and inhabits the genre world enthusiastically.

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Vintage Treasures: Neutron Star by Larry Niven

Vintage Treasures: Neutron Star by Larry Niven

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Neutron Star (Ballantine Bools, April 1968). Cover artist unknown

As I was preparing last week’s Vintage Treasures article (on Poul Anderson’s Fire Time), I realized that the next book on deck was Neutron Star, by Larry Niven, one of the most important science fiction collections of the 20th Century. And I simultaneously realized we’ve never done a Vintage Treasures feature on Niven before, a pretty serious oversight. (For comparison purposes, as I was assembling reference links at the bottom of my Fire Time piece, there simply wasn’t room to include the dozens of articles we’ve written on Anderson.) In fact, other than a pair of reviews by Fletcher Vredenburgh, two blog posts on Convergent Series by Steven Silver, and a note on the 1973 Skylark Award by Rich Horton, we’ve had virtually no coverage of Niven at all on Black Gate.

I’m to blame for this. Niven is, unquestionably, one of the most important science fiction writers alive today. But I was never a fan of his novels (I made two attempts to read his classic Ringworld, before giving up for good in the early 80s). His short stories, however, are a different matter, and I’m very glad to finally have the chance to discuss his first collection, the groundbreaking Neutron Star, first published as a paperback original by Ballantine Books in April 1968.

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Science Fiction History Considered As a Series of Images of Newsstand Displays

Science Fiction History Considered As a Series of Images of Newsstand Displays

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Science Fiction magazines likely displayed on the stands at ten year intervals, 1933 to 2013

Many readers here no doubt lack the experience of having personally cruised news stands, tobacco shops and underground hole-in-the-wall used book stores, through no fault of their own. Unless you can fault someone for not having been born in a particular year, which I think would be a silly thing to do.

I, on the other hand, managed to arrive on this planet at a time conducive to such things. Following a brief orientation period lasting a handful of years, during which I learned how to navigate within a 1G gravitational field and picked up a few useful tips, such as becoming proficient in one of the native languages and where food came from, not to mention the necessity of wearing clothing when out and about, I was introduced to a small, yet extremely powerful concept called “Science Fiction”.

In short order I became enraptured and the rest, as they say, is personal history.

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Goth Chick News: The Night We Played Terror Roulette

Goth Chick News: The Night We Played Terror Roulette

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September means one thing here at GCN – haunted attractions grand openings. The result is that Black Gate photog Chris Z and I usually spend most if not all September weekends getting early looks at the latest upgrades to the Chicagoland haunts. I am proud to brag that several entries on any list of “the nation’s best haunted attractions” are local to us, which means the bar around here is set pretty darn high.

This year, Chris Z’s long-suffering spouse had enough of his haunted house nonsense and booked an extended vacation abroad during the month of September. Though I understand not wanting to try to organize one’s wedding anniversary celebration around a Hell’s Gate press night, Chris Z’s absence left me feeling kind of pathetic. I mean, in the very early days of GCN I used to cover all the events on my own, but I had to admit that I’d grown accustomed to his rolling commentary and snarky asides.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Beware of Greeks

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Beware of Greeks

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Xena and Hercules

If you were watching TV in the late ‘90s, it was pretty hard to avoid Kevin Sorbo’s Hercules series and its spinoffs, even if you wanted to. Despite its modest budget, unambitious stories, and mostly indifferent acting, this likable family-friendly series nonetheless found an audience devoted enough to sustain it through six TV seasons.

There was clearly a hunger for solid fantasy adventures, and Hercules fed that demand. In fact, the Herc series revealed so much demand for fantasy that to meet it, it generated the vastly superior Xena: Warrior Princess show, which is so good that we can forgive the much weaker Hercules show almost anything. Ki-yi-yi-yi-yi!

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Marketing is Hard, BookTok is Harder

Marketing is Hard, BookTok is Harder

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Good Afterevenmorn!

I’m back at it with the mentions of BookTok, largely in part because this is a (relatively) new-to-me social media site, and I’m still trying to plumb its depths and unravel its mysteries. Right now, all I’ve managed to do is upload a few vids that are largely trying out silly filters and somehow turn my ‘For You Page’ into nothing but Astarion (from the Baldur’s Gate 3 game that was recently released) thirst traps.

You like one funny video…

In any case, I understand that it can be an incredibly powerful tool in getting a readership — which I so desperately need if I have any hope of making any kind of living from my writing. BookTok is such a powerful player in the publishing world that brick-and-mortar stores often have a table near the front door devoted to books that have popped off on the site. Conquering BookTok is now one of the best ways to acquire that much-needed readership.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: William Patrick Murray on Cross-Genre Confusion, and Supernatural Westerns

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: William Patrick Murray on Cross-Genre Confusion, and Supernatural Westerns

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“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)

Last week was part two of  fellow Robert E Howard Foundation Award-winner John Bullard’s look at Robert E. Howard’s humorous Westerns. Earlier this summer, Pulp maven (and fellow Sherlock Holmes afficionado) William Murray revealed right here in this column, that Dashiell Hammett did not actually write “The Diamond Wager/” Will, who has written about Doc Savage, and The Spider, for A (Black) Gat in the Hand, is back at it again. 

Will – who has written THE look at Western pulps – Wordslingers: An Epitaph for the Western – takes us into the world of Weird Westerns. It’s no surprise that Pulp editors were leery of ‘crossing the streams’ for these types of stories. Read on!

Cross Genre Confusion

In the beginning, the pulp magazine was an undifferentiated product.

Starting with the first of its type, The Argosy, it was essentially a colorful cornucopia of fiction, much of it belonging to no particular category. Stories of city, farm, and tenement life were common. Yarns set in the half-tamed West were not always gunsmoke sagas, but simply narratives set in the contemporary West. Historical tales were also common. As were simple homespun comedies. Many were quasi-adventure stories of men at their work. Thus we often discover coal mining episodes, off-field yarns, and Mountie exploits.

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Vintage Treasures: Fire Time by Poul Anderson

Vintage Treasures: Fire Time by Poul Anderson

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Fire Time by Poul Anderson (Ballantine Books, November, 1975). Cover by Darrell Sweet

Poul Anderson was a terrifically prolific and popular science fiction writer, in a way I don’t think it’s possible to be today. I mean that in the sense that, yes, he wrote a lot of books — a ridiculous number of books, really. He published hundreds of novels and short stories in his lifetime. (How many, exactly? I have no idea. No one knows. Modern counting methods have failed us. Though there are studious attempts online, and I find this one at Book Series in Order particularly handy.)

But more meaningfully, I mean that every visit to the science fiction section of a well stocked bookstore for the first few decades of my life presented you with dozens of titles by Poul Anderson. Yes, he wrote a lot of books, but unlike most writers his books remained in print — often for decades. He was a reliable presence on bookstore shelves the way Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein were, or J.R.R. Tolkien and Stephen King are today. In other words, he was a midlist writer who was treated like a bestselling author, and that never happens any more.

I read a lot of Poul Anderson as a result (a lot of folks did). But one book that escaped me, though I was always interested, was his 1974 SF novel Fire Time.

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Neverwhens: Picts, Romans, Eldritch Horrors and Giants in the Earth collide in The Shadows of Thule by Patrick Mallet and Lionel Marty

Neverwhens: Picts, Romans, Eldritch Horrors and Giants in the Earth collide in The Shadows of Thule by Patrick Mallet and Lionel Marty

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The Shadows of Thule (Humanoids, August 15, 2023). Cover by Lionel Marty

Scotland, 2nd Century AD. The Roman conquest has stopped south of Hadrian’s Wall; beyond it lies the land of the unconquered Gauls, and even further north, the wild hills of the Pictish people.

When a Roman general loses his wife in a Pictish raid, a mysterious necromancer convinces him to awaken an ancient horror and unleash it on the North. In response, Cormak Mac Fianna, the last king of the Picts, unites his fractured tribes to fight the rising evil. But he soon finds that the power of his tribes is not enough to stop the terrifying Shadows of Thulé from destroying everything in their path.

The only solution is to join forces with their enemies to fight the coming apocalypse but can the Picts, the Gauls, and the Romans set aside their differences long enough to save the world from the ancient evil threatening their existence?

It’s a growingly fine time for sword & sorcery: via small press efforts, via a new work by a major press (Howard Andrew Jones’s magisterial Lord of a Shattered Land) and by Titan’s reprints and pastiche of the works of Robert E. Howard. Among Titan’s efforts has been a much-heralded new Conan comic (rightly so, so far), but this ignores the long-standing catalog of French sword & sorcery comics (indeed, the French mag The Cimmerian is several years old already, and also decidedly better than Marvel’s recent mishandling of the adventuring barbarian.) Fortunately, Humanoids has been increasingly making a number of their titles available in English translation, and one of the newest is about as Sword & Sorcery as it gets!

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New Treasures: The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez

New Treasures: The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez

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The Spear Cuts Through Water (Del Rey, May 30, 2023). Cover by Simón Prades

I always seem to be late with Simon Jimenez. Last year I found his acclaimed debut novel The Vanished Birds buried in the bottom of my TBR file, and three weeks ago I nabbed his follow up The Spear Cuts Through Water the instant I spotted it. Which turned out to be nearly a year after it was published, in August of last year. Some people arrive just as the party’s getting started, and some of us show up when the hors d’oeuvres are all gone and the cops have already raided the place.

Well, it’s still new to me, I guess. This looks like the last weekend of summer weather we’ll get in Chicago, and this book will keep me company on the porch. The Spear Cuts Through Water is the story of two warriors who must guide a dying goddess across a dangerous land, to bring an end to the rule of a tyrannical family. Paul Di Filippo at Locus compares it to Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (high praise in my book), calling it “utterly individual… A wild chase and odyssey which you must read to believe,” and Polygon included it in their list of Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2022, calling it “mesmerizing… a love story unlike anything you’ve read before.”

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