Random Reviews: “Twelve-Steppe Program,” by Esther Friesner

Random Reviews: “Twelve-Steppe Program,” by Esther Friesner

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Cover by Tristan Elwell
Cover by Tristan Elwell

Last week’s story, “The Birth of A.I.” was a humorous short story which led up to a single punchline. This week’s story, Esther Friesner’s “Twelve-Steppe Program” is a longer humorous short story that rather than serve as the delivery system for a joke, focuses on the situations Friesner establishes to find its humor rather than punchlines.

The eunuch Nir Mung-Mung has been ordered to travel to the Garikkh horde to retrieve Princess Anuk’ti so she can become the bride of Prince Floats-like-dandelion-fluff-upon-the-scented-waters. Unfortunately for Nir Mung-Mung, he is entirely aware of the political machinations of the Chief Eunuch who is less interested in establishing a marriage between Prince Fluffy and Princess Anuk’ti and more concerned with holding onto his role as Chief Eunuch and making sure that any of his rivals, of whom he includes Nir Mung-Mung, are removed from contention to replace him.

For her part, Princess Anuk’ti is not the demure bride that Nir Mung-Mung was expecting to escort. Among her first interactions with him was an attempt to seduce him, not recognizing that he was a eunuch. In any event, Anuk’ti has her own agenda and once Nir Mung-Mung and Anuk’ti begin listening to each other, they come up with the beginnings of a plan to ensure both of their survivals in a court that is designed to be inhospitable to them.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: They Might Be Giants

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: They Might Be Giants

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The Giant of Marathon (Italy/France, 1959)

When you think of Italian cinema, probably the first thing that comes to mind are its great dramatic directors such as Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Federico Fellini. But you wouldn’t be reading this fine website devoted to genre fiction if the second thing wasn’t Italy’s action films, the Spaghetti Westerns, such as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly from the decade of 1964-74, and the historical epics from the decade before that, the so-called peplum or sword-and-sandal adventures. The latter movies, with their sword-swinging action heroes, fall inside the ambit of this article series, where we frequently try to draw you attention to them, little known as many of them are to American or British film fans. Here we are again this week, with three more you ought to know about.

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Robert Bloch’s Pocket History of Science Fiction Fandom

Robert Bloch’s Pocket History of Science Fiction Fandom

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The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1954. Cover by Mel Hunter

I’ve spent the last few days putting my book collection in order, and yesterday I came across this, the first sf magazine I ever purchased: the March 1964 issue of F&SF, from a little shop in the town of Port Credit, Ontario.

J.G. Ballard, Kit Reed, Oscar Wilde, Avram Davidson’s haunting little story “Sacheverell” — pretty heady stuff for a precocious ten-year-old. But what had the greatest impact, looking backward from 2022, was Robert Bloch’s article “The Conventional Approach” — a pocket history of science fiction fandom. I was already nursing an ambition to write, specifically to write sf, and here was what looked like an invitation to a subculture of like-minded enthusiasts and maybe even a roadmap to a career.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: The Murdering Spinsters

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: The Murdering Spinsters

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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)

In Brooklyn during World War II, a pair of black widows were luring men to their deaths. They preyed upon older, lonely men without family or close friends. With a “Room for rent” sign hanging in the front window of their idyllic-looking home, they fed arsenic-laced wine to their victims. A male relative who lived with them buried the bodies in the basement, with no one the wiser. The women were in fact little old ladies: think Aunt Bee as a serial killer.

But a nephew came over and found a body in window seat – the thirteenth victim. He slowly realized that his two loveable old aunts were killers. Then, his brother, a murderer on the lam from the police, showed up with his lackey in tow. It’s a hardboiled, true crime story that curiously, is largely forgotten today.

Just kidding! It’s actually Arsenic and Old Lace, a smash stage play that became a popular movie starring Cary Grant, Raymond Massey and Peter Lorre. The play ran on Broadway for 1,444 performances and is still in wide use today.

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In Hell, Everyone’s Pants are on Fire: A preview of Liars in Hell

In Hell, Everyone’s Pants are on Fire: A preview of Liars in Hell

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Liars in Hell, Volume 25 in the Heroes in Hell™ series. Copyright © 2022, 321pages. Janet Morris. Cover painting: “Orestes Pursued by the Furies,” by William Adolphe Bouguereau; Cover Design Roy Mauritsen.

In Hell, Everyone’s Pants are on Fire!

Faux News and Big Lies might feel like a contemporary pain, but rest assured, dear reader! Your curse has been shared. Liars have been meddling with humanity throughout history. Here ye the accounts of their eternal demise journaled by the damnedest writers in perdition. Note, that each themed entry in the Heroes in Hell™ series can be read separately. Hell has many entry points.

Going back some years ago to Doctors in Hell (2015, to be exact), we introduced a series of plagues in Hell, sent by Erra, the Babylonian god of plagues and pestilence. He and his Seven Sibitti were sent down into Hell to punish the damned in ways Satan should have been meting out punishment. Satan had become too lax, too lenient, and Erra and his gang had been sent on a “mission from God” to show the Prince of Darkness how it’s done. These plagues have remained the consistent, underlying arc through Doctors in Hell, Pirates in Hell, Lovers in Hell, and Mystics in Hell. And then, in 2020, life imitated art when the Covid pandemic began to spread across the globe. Now, with Liars in Hell, art takes its turn and imitates life as we deal with some real events that have happened over the course of the last seven or so years.

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New Treasures: The Siren’s Song by Andrew Paul Weston

New Treasures: The Siren’s Song by Andrew Paul Weston

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The Siren’s Song: The Cambion Journals, Book Three, by Andrew P. Weston (Raven Tale Publishing. Kindle edition; released July 2022).

Andrew Paul Weston has described himself as a “Former Royal Marine, Police Officer & Crime & Intelligence analyst, cursed with an overactive imagination.” His muse and expertise drive him to write action-adventure that spans genres. Black Gate’s Fletcher Vredenburgh reviewed his internationally bestselling IX Series, military sci-fi that transports the lost Roman IX Legion across time & space to fight energy-eating monsters (book #1 The IX, book #2 Prelude to Sorrow, book #3 Exordium of Tears). And Joe Bonadonna covered Weston’s trilogy following the Devil’s hitman, Daemon Grim, set in Janet Morris’ Heroes in Hell ™ universe (book #1 Hell Bound, book #2 Hell Hounds, book #3 Hell Gate).

With The Siren’s Song (just released), Weston continues The Cambion Journal series which promises to be a six-novella series. It tracks Augustus Thorne, a “Cambion” (a half-demon, half-human hybrid). He’s cursed with a terrible hunger he can barely control, hunting and exterminating any Incubi and Succubae he can find.

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Future Treasures: The Year’s Best Fantasy: Volume One edited by Paula Guran

Future Treasures: The Year’s Best Fantasy: Volume One edited by Paula Guran

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The Year’s Best Fantasy: Volume One (Pyr, August 16, 2022). Cover by Liu Zishan

Paula Guran edited ten volumes of The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror for Prime Books between 2010-2019. She brought the series to Pyr in 2020, and it’s done well enough that this year Pyr launched a companion volume: The Year’s Best Fantasy: Volume One, also with Paula’s capable hand at the helm.

I’m delighted to see a brand new BEST OF series devoted exclusively to fantasy. This is a great volume to start with, containing a new Morlock tale by James Enge, AND a story by our first website editor C.S.E. Cooney (co-authored with her husband Carlos Hernandez), plus fiction from P. Djèlí Clark, Karen Joy Fowler, Sofia Samatar, E. Lily Yu, Isabel Yap, Catherynne Valente, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, and many others. It goes on sale next week.

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Random Reviews: “The Birth of A.I.,” by Cynthia Ward

Random Reviews: “The Birth of A.I.,” by Cynthia Ward

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XOddity, May 1998
XOddity, May 1998

Sometimes the roll of the dice produces a story that isn’t really all that easy to discuss. This week’s story, “The Birth of A.I,” is a (very) short humorous story about the birth of artificial intelligence by Cynthia Ward. The story originally appeared in the third issue of Xoddity in 1998.

Ward’s story is quite short, taking up about a page, and it mostly a set up for a punch line, although it doesn’t quite qualify as a shaggy dog story. The story also suffers from the fact that, written in 1998, computing power and the advance of artificial intelligence evolved in a very different manner than the enormous mainframes Ward discusses in her story.

The scientists in Ward’s story have been attempting to create a machine that can pass the Turing test, although the story doesn’t present it in those terms. Essentially they want to make a computer that has the same level of intelligence and sentience as a human being. When the story opens, they are on the verge of succeeding and Dr. Maria Denhurst is pondering what the artificial intelligence will be like and how it will react.

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IMHO: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF SWORD & SORCERY AND HEROIC FANTASY

IMHO: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF SWORD & SORCERY AND HEROIC FANTASY

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Weird Tales featuring “Devil in Iron” by Robert E. Howard, art by Margaret Brundage (~1934); Conan the Conqueror by REH and Lyon Sprague de Camp, art by Frazetta (~1967);  The Road of Kings by Karl Edward Wagner art by Matt Stawicki (1979); Kothar of the Magic Sword by Gardner F. Fox, art by Jeff Jones (~1969)

The Evolving and Cloned Barbarian

Conan, King Kull, Cormac, Bran Mak Morn — names that conjure magic, characters often imitated, but never duplicated. These creations of Robert E. Howard (circa 1930) started the Sword and Sorcery boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. Then there are the barbarian warriors inspired by Howard — “Clonans,” as one writer recently referred to these sword-slinging, muscle-bound characters. A fair observation, but in some cases, not so true.

I prefer to think of these “Clonan” tales of wandering barbarian heroes as “Barbarian Solo” adventures because the majority of these characters are lone wolves, without sidekicks or even recurring companions. This is a big part of their appeal, in fact, and in their own way, they are reminiscent of many cinematic westerns. I’ve read many, if not most, of the early Conan pastiches, including the novels based on Howard’s other creations. Karl Edward Wagner’s, Poul Anderson’s, and Andy Offutt’s portrayals of the Cimmerian come within a sword’s stroke of Howard’s original vision. L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, in commodifying the character, arranged the long, informal saga of Conan in chronological order and, by extenuating these adventures with dozens more, made of Howard’s creation a long-form series similar to the episodic success of a television show on a prolonged run of diminishing returns. For some readers, however, the advantage of this development is that it provided a sort of character arc as Conan grows from a youth to an older man.

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Blob Monsters, Killer Alien Plants, and Feral Automobiles: July/August 2022 Print SF Magazines

Blob Monsters, Killer Alien Plants, and Feral Automobiles: July/August 2022 Print SF Magazines

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July/August 2022 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by Donato Giancola, Eldar Zakirov, and Alan M. Clark

It’s marvelous to see a cover by the great Donato Giancola on Analog, of all places. Donato did one cover for Black Gate, our famous Red Sonja cover for Black Gate 15, our special Warrior Women issue. Analog‘s last cover was by NASA, the inside of a satellite or reactor or Easy Bake oven or something. This one is much cooler.

Shipping problems have delayed the arrival of this month’s F&SF, so I don’t have a copy in my hot little hands in time to do this article (again), but Tangent Online has the Table of Contents, so I can fake it. There’s lots of good reading in this month’s print SF mags, including stories by Jerry Oltion, Sean Monaghan, Bruce McAllister, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Rick Wilber, Will McIntosh, Michael Swanwick, Octavia Cade, Jack McDevitt, Paul Melko, Nick Wolven, James L. Sutter, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and many others. Let’s dive in.

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