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Race For the Galaxy, Revised 2nd Edition, by Tom Lehmann (Rio Grande Games, 2007)

As I mentioned in my review of Terraforming Mars, Race for the Galaxy is one of my long-time favorite games. Its play models the expansion of up to four interstellar civilizations, each from one of five possible starting points: Old Earth, Epsilon Eridani, Alpha Centauri, New Sparta, and Earth’s Lost Colony. Development is represented abstractly, with nothing that represents physical variables, population, or any other real quantity; the idea is to come up with the right combinations of capabilities.

This is a card game, not a board game. There’s no predefined space for play to happen in. Rather, each player creates their own space by the play of their cards into a “tableau.”

When any player’s tableau gets up to twelve cards, the game ends and players’ scores are determined. Scores are represented by the only other game components: victory point counters. Players can acquire victory points in the course of play, but the decisive scores are determined at the end, based on what’s in each player’s tableau.

The rules are a bit complex, but I was able to summarize them in a few minutes. And the game comes with helpful large cards that have “round summary” on one side and “card summary” on the other, one for each player.

Race for the Galaxy Card Summary

Race for the Galaxy has an ingenious design where cards serve multiple functions. Played face up onto a tableau, they can represent either worlds added to one’s galactic civilization, or technological or social advances achieved by it (“developments”). Discarded face down, they represent a price that must be paid to put a world or a development into play.

Played face down onto a world card, they represent its economic output (one of novelty goods, rare elements, genes, or alien technology), which can later be discarded to gain victory points and/or more cards in the player’s hand.

Since each turn ends with reducing hands to no more than ten cards, players have to economize carefully in putting worlds or developments into play: Cards with lower payoffs may be better discarded to pay for activating cards with higher payoffs.

Race for the Galaxy Round Summary

A lot of the play of a hand is thinking about what combinations of cards will give the most useful results, based on the goods worlds can produce and the powers that worlds or developments may provide. For example, a tableau with worlds that produce rare elements invites playing cards that allow trading in rare elements, or that make it cheaper to add a rare element world to a tableau, or that score victory points at the end for having rare element worlds in the tableau — and so a player can develop a kind of theme where those specific cards have high value.

There’s a higher-level strategic choice behind all of this: There are two ways to add worlds to a tableau. The economic route involves spending cards from a hand: “buying” the world, or symbolically, colonizing it. The military route doesn’t require such an expenditure. Instead, the military power ratings for all the worlds in the tableau are added up and compared with the stated military power to conquer a world.

So players choose to act either as builders or as conquerors (the proverbial “guns or butter”). I have to confess both to a philosophical bias toward the economic route, and to finding the combinatorics it’s based on more interesting; when I introduced a friend to the game recently, I intentionally chose to play a military world and follow a military strategy, as an informal handicap — which seems to have worked, as he beat me handily in that first game!

The thing that’s largely missing in Race for the Galaxy is player interaction. There’s not much players can do either to help each other or to hurt each other! (My wife doesn’t much enjoy it as a game because of that design feature; she prefers more social games — for example, the elaborate trading in Settlers of Catan.) Play is, literally, a race: Who can build or conquer faster?

Race for the Galaxy and two expansions: The Gathering Storm and Rebel vs Imperium

Watching other players has mostly indirect effects. First, there are five actions that can be taken in a turn: Explore (adding new cards to a hand), Develop (playing developments onto a tableau), Settle (playing worlds onto a tableau), Consume (exchanging goods for victory points and/or additional cards), and Produce (having one or more worlds add new goods). But they don’t all happen in a turn! Each player selects one action that will benefit them.

So it’s sometimes possible to say, “Fred’s low on cards, he needs to explore, so I don’t have to select Explore.” Second, if another player is getting close to having a dozen cards in their tableau, that’s a signal to go for quick payoffs in play, and disregard long-term tactics that probably won’t be completed. I’m not sure yet how much of a difference that makes, as I hadn’t paid close attention to it in my previous experience with the game.

The absence of direct rivalry aside, Race for the Galaxy seems to have enough complexities so that it’s not for everybody; it feels as if it’s roughly at the level of, say, Terraforming Mars (though play is much faster — my friend and I got through two rounds in less time than one round of Terraforming Mars took us).

This may be partly a reflection of the inherent challenges of economic/technological development games. But it’s a genre that I like a lot, and Race for the Galaxy strikes me as an excellent example of it.

William H. Stoddard is a professional copy editor specializing in scholarly and scientific publications. As a secondary career, he has written more than two dozen books for Steve Jackson Games, starting in 2000 with GURPS Steampunk. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife, their cat (a ginger tabby), and a hundred shelf feet of books, including large amounts of science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novels.

Swordsmen and Supermen (Centaur Press, February 1972). Cover by Virgil Finlay

Swordsmen and Supermen 1972, subtitled “Swashbuckling Fantastic Anthology.” From Centaur Press, edited by Donald M. Grant. Cover from Virgil Finlay. This was linked to Centaur Press’s Time-Lost series of books but I’m not sure it quite fit that or the “swashbuckling” subtitle. It’s a strange mishmash of material, including three old reprints and two new stories (from ’72).

It starts off with a Robert E. Howard story, but it’s one of his humorous westerns featuring Breckinridge Elkins called “Meet Cap’n Kidd.” It’s a funny tale but not really the type of fantasy one associates with Swordsmen.

The Red Gods by Jean D’Esme, translated from the French by Moreby Acklom (E. P. Dutton, 1924). Cover artist unknown

Then we have “The Death of a Hero” by Jean D’Esme, which does have some sword and axe battles, but it’s an excerpted piece of a novel called The Red Gods and I’m not sure how well it stood on its own.

Third is “Wings of Y’vrn” by Darrel Crombie, featuring a shapeshifter main character. Donald Grant was apparently very high on Crombie at this time, and the prose is well done. Crombie was a pseudonym for Joseph Fraser Darby, a Canadian who had worked as a journalist. Apparently this is the only known story by Crombie. I liked it pretty well.

Grey Maiden: The Story of a Sword Through the Ages by Arthur D.
Howden Smith (Centaur Press, October 1974). Cover by David Ireland

“The Slave of Marathon” is next, by well-known writer Arthur D. Howden Smith (1887 – 1945). This is one of Smith’s Gray Maiden stories (Gray Maiden being a sword) and is my favorite story in the book.

Finally, we end with “How Sargoth Lay Siege to Zarwemm” by Lin Carter. This is a very brief piece, only a few pages, by Carter, and while well-written, is not really a story at all but more of a vignette about an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.

Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for us was on Avon Fantasy Reader, edited by Donald A. Wollheim. See all of his recent posts for Black Gate here.

Kingdom of Heaven Director’s Cut (20th Century Fox, December 23, 2005) Kingdom of Heaven (Director’s Cut) (194 minutes; 2005)

Written by William Monahan. Directed by Ridley Scott.

(There is a shorter theatrical cut, which should be avoided at all costs, like the plague it is.)

What is it?

Ridley Scott’s epic saga of the Crusades, as seen through the eyes of a simple French blacksmith who travels to Jerusalem in an attempt to save the soul of his late wife, and ends up as the defender of the city against the massive army of Saladin.

Noteworthy

After massive edits mandated by the studio in order to shorten it, the theatrical cut of this film was a bomb. The restored Director’s Cut is, to put it simply, a masterpiece. It is a completely different film from the one the editors hacked to pieces and sent out to theaters, with 45 minutes (!!) of restored footage that completely changes the story and the characters.

For one example of many: in the theatrical cut, Eva Green’s character, the Queen of Jerusalem, comes across as acting irrationally, because we don’t know her motivations. In the Director’s Cut, we gain entirely new and powerful subplots involving her brother, her husband and her son, all of which render her actions quite clear and understandable. The queen becomes half of the beating heart of the story.

How anyone could have thought the movie was improved by omitting even a portion of that material is beyond comprehension.

Orlando Bloom and Liam Neeson in Kingdom of Heaven

The cast is filled with famous actors. Orlando Bloom stars as the reluctant warrior, Balian. Eva Green is the queen of Jerusalem (with Edward Norton uncredited as her brother, the leper king). Liam Neeson is the Baron of Ibelin and father of Balian. Jeremy Irons is, effectively, the police chief of Jerusalem.

The rest of the stellar cast includes Michael Sheen, David Thewlis, Kevin McKidd, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Marton Csokas, Alexander Siddig, Ghassan Massoud, Brendan Gleeson and Iain Glen, among many others. Good heavens.

With the increasing availability of the Director’s Cut, public acclaim for the film has drastically improved. In just the past year alone, the IMDb rating has risen from 5.6 to 7.3, presumably on the strength of viewers’ votes after seeing the Director’s Cut. At this rate, it should deservedly reach a perfect 10 within a couple more years!

(Also of note: Scott’s underrated 2010 Robin Hood movie, starring Russell Crowe, is arguably a direct sequel. Kingdom of Heaven ends with King Richard the Lionheart stopping by Balian’s village on his way to the Crusades, while Robin Hood begins with the king’s journey back home.)

Michael Sheen and Orlando Bloom in Kingdom of Heaven Quick and Dirty Summary

During the Crusades, Balian the blacksmith (Bloom) travels from France to Jerusalem to seek forgiveness from God for himself and for his late wife, who committed suicide after the death of their infant child.

Along the way, he kills his half-brother (Sheen) — who needed killing, honestly. He discovers his true father (Neeson), falls in love with a queen (Green), battles corrupt knights (Csokas and Gleeson), and befriends a king (Norton).

He also wrestles with moral questions, impresses a top aide (Siddig) to the great warlord Saladin (Massoud), and absorbs wise counsel from knights such as Hospitaler (Thewlis) and Tiberias (Irons), helping him grow as a man, a knight and a leader. And just in time – because the next thing he knows, this former blacksmith is suddenly in charge of defending Jerusalem from attack by Saladin’s massive army!

Fantasy/SF/Sword & Sorcery Elements

There’s plenty of sword, as in a number of battles involving massive armies, as well as several individual duels (one sword, two swords, a half-molten sword – a lot of swords!). The sorcery elements are more of a religious nature, but unquestionably and increasingly supernatural as the story unfolds.

The Hospitaller Knight – no other name is given for him – is the focus of the most fantastical aspects of the story. At three particular moments he exhibits abilities that elevate him from mere human to divine and perhaps angelic being.

First, during an early battle scene, Hospitaler evades arrows by disappearing from his horse as it runs through the Crusader camp. Ridley Scott doesn’t play fair with us here, however, as we quickly see that the knight has simply shifted to the far side of the horse, hanging on for dear life while making his horse appear riderless. But it serves a tease for what is to come.

David Thewlis as the Hospitaller Knight

The second scene cranks up the weirdness quite a bit. As Balian sits alone in the desert, brooding over his situation, Hospitaller walks up and addresses him, handing out more deep moral philosophy. Once the knight is done, a literal “burning bush” distracts Balian. When he looks back a moment later, Hospitaler is nowhere to be seen. In true Batman fashion, he has vanished from a vast, wide-open desert. Balian’s horse cries out and rears, as if a ghost – or an angel – had just moved past it, invisible.

Finally, when Balian lies near death following a fight with two of Guy’s Templar knights, Hospitaller appears from out of nowhere. He touches Balian on the forehead, restoring him to life – just in time to try to stop the army of Jerusalem from marching out to its destruction.

Clearly, there’s something going on with that character beyond the realms of mortal man. Some have argued Hospitaler is God himself, or at least an angel, sent to guide Balian. But we are left to puzzle out those specifics for ourselves.

Eva Green in Kingdom of Heaven High Point

For all the action and romance and adventure, what still rings true above all else with this film is its powerful message that what king one serves or what religion one adheres to does not ultimately make one a good or bad person. What matters is what we choose to do, and choose not to do – as both the leper king and the priest-knight Hospitaler repeatedly point out to Balian.

One scene crystallizes this entire message. When Balian confides in the Hospitaller Knight that he fears he has lost his religion, the knight responds in a way that shocks the young man – and perhaps the audience, as it comes from a holy man. But it lays out the great message of the film:

I put no stock in religion. By the word religion I have seen the lunacy of fanatics of every denomination be called the will of God. I’ve seen too much religion in the eyes of too many murderers. Holiness is in right action, and courage on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves. And goodness — what God desires — is here (points to head) and here (points to heart). And by what you decide to do every day, you will be a good man. Or not.

Ghassan Massoud as Saladin Low Point

Balian repeatedly states that his only goal is to be “a good knight.” From this, multiple people respond in shock, with reactions along the lines of, “A perfect knight? Good heavens!” As in, who does he think he is??

But he never says “perfect.” Never once. Just “good.”

It makes me want to pull my hair out.

Standout Performance

Marton Csokas, who played Celeborn in The Lord of the Rings and who auditioned for the part of Balian in this film, makes for a truly memorable and despicable villain as Guy de Lusignan, head of the Templar Knights. When he’s not sneering on a scale perhaps not seen since Basil Rathbone in the 1938 Robin Hood or scheming against our hero, he’s throwing hissy fits or issuing catastrophically bad orders to his army. In a movie with so many good-guy supporting characters, Csokas shines in his own darkness.

Kingdom of Heaven theatrical poster Overall Evaluation as a Movie and as Fantasy/SF/Sword & Sorcery

While not as much a Fantasy film as some others, Kingdom of Heaven contains enough Medieval battles, one-on-one sword fights, supernatural forces and general derring-do to place it alongside the best of that genre. Throw in the entire moral and ethical layer, and the film achieves masterpiece status.

Just treat that theatrical cut like the leper it is!

Van Allen Plexico is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), a Grand Master of Pulp Literature (2025 class) and a multiple-award-winning author of more than two dozen novels and anthologies, ranging from space opera to Kaiju to crime fiction to superheroes to military SF. He notably edited, co-created and co-wrote the Sword and Sorcery anthology GIDEON CAIN: DEMON HUNTER. Find all of his works on Amazon and at Plexico.net.

Firefly

For a show that hardly anybody watched (it was reportedly 98th in the Nielsen Ratings for 2002-2003. The TV Guide Ratings page has it at 125th, and Fox’s lowest-ranked show), that one word carries a lot of weight 23 years later.

Fox famously aired the double-length pilot, which set the show up, as episode eleven, and then canceled the show, leaving three episodes unaired. It was also placed in the legendary Friday Night Death slot (where they also buried the far-more deserving The Adventures of Brisco County Jr).

The crew got to reunite and wrap things up two years later in the movie Serenity (which killed off two cast members). There were hopes to do more movies, but even after cutting the budget from $100 million to $39 million, it lost money in the US (98th) and barely broke even worldwide (111th). And  the Serenity (which is the ship: Firefly is its class) was grounded for good.

But over the years, Firefly came to be the definitive ‘cult classic,’ and the cast became fan convention staples. You can find all kinds of Firefly info on the web. And both streaming on Hulu, and Prime, the episodes are in order, which I HIGHLY recommend for viewing. Novels, board games, graphic novels — interest remained alive in more Firefly ‘stuff.’

I mentioned that Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk started a weekly podcast (Once We Were Spacemen), which is geek heaven. They’ve had several Firefly members on, and other folks from their careers. I love it.

THE BUILDUP

On February 23, a story/vid dropped on their IG page. Nathan Fillion knocks on the door of what looks like Gina Torres’ (Zoe) on-set trailer. She asks “Does this mean it’s time.” He replies, “It’s time.” She looks up wistfully, and Fillion looks confusedly at the skies, as if for Serenity. They both say ‘okay’ a few times and it ends. My response was “Holy crap! What’s happening?”

The Firefly fandom lost its collective mind and speculation was immediate. While a full-blown revival has been a dream for two decades, common thoughts were a gathering at a convention, or a reunion on Fillion’s show The Rookie, or on a podcast.

Two days later, Fillion shows up at Morena Baccarin’s (Inara) house. She is currently starring in the Fire Country spin-off, Sheriff Country. This one is cute, as Fillion is in his The Rookie uniform. And she answers in her sheriff uniform. He flashes that boyish smile and starts to comment they’re both in their uniforms, and she cuts him off with “You son of a bitch.” “He’s startled. “Are we doing this?” “Oh. We’re doing this.” More gravely serious head nodding.

Firefly fans were abuzz after the Gina vid. Now, with two, clearly something was going on. And the stakes has been raised.

There is a new line of Firefly Funko Pops coming out, and the cynical dismissed this new ‘thing’ as leading to pushing the Funkos. While that’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility, Fillion had to know that would be an incredibly disappointing payoff after generating so much excitement.

Two days after that (now it’s February 27), Fillion knocks on Sean Maher’s (Simon) door. Maher peaks through, opens the door, says “We don’t want any,” then shuts it and goes back inside. Filion makes a despairing face, knocks again, points at his face with a “It’s Nathan” expression as Maher opens the door. The ‘It’s happening’ thing repeats. Maher gets blown out his doorway by the wind.. The long looks during the head nods, the little extras: these are fun for the cast and fans.

March 2, he’s at Summer Glau’s door. She speaks in very River fashion, and says that she knew the day would come as she stares off into some other place. Deadpan, Fillion says, “Yeah. Still a little creepy when you do that.”

Two days later and he’s knocking on Jewel Staite’s (Kaylee) door. She smiles and says “Shiny,” which makes Nathan smile. More odd head nodding.

March 7, he knocks on Adam Baldwin’s (Jayne) door. Baldwin is wearing Jayne’s orange and yellow hat. Fillion is holding the same hat, and he looks at his and tosses it aside. Both men finish with “Okay then.”

SIDE NOTE – I’m LOVING all this Firefly activity. Fillion and Tudyk have commented that the Joss Whedon who is a pariah now, was not the guy they knew. And that they’d absolutely work with him on a new Firefly. Baldwin appeared on Castle before he got more openly far-right. Clearly, they feel he’s still a part of Firefly. Don’t bother with comments about your dislike of them or their whatever views. I’ll delete them. This is a celebration of Firefly, whatever directional wing they identify with.

On March 12, Fillion shows up at Alan Tudyk’s (Wash) house. He tells him he’s not doing it without him, and Tudyk is so excited he slaps him. They have a very ‘them’ exchange. If you listen to their podcast, they have been real-life friends since Firefly, and they’re fun together.

Since Wash died in Serenity (if that’s a spoiler, I’m not sure why you’re even reading this post), it was uncertain if he would be part of this. Since the two are buddies, I assumed somehow they’ll find a way, even if it’s some kind of continuation series. Maybe he’ll be voices of characters, or a robot, or whatever. But I was happy to see Tudyk get an appearance.

Sadly, Ron Glass (Shepherd Book) died in 2016. So, no visit for Book.

There’s been nary a word about Joss Whedon. It was HIS show. He created, wrote, directed, produced, and even did music for it. Depending on what IT actually is, it’s hard to imagine a new live-action iteration, without him. As I mentioned above, the two have said they would work with him again (and on their podcast a week ago, Felicia Day spoke warmly about Whedon. Not everyone who has worked with him dislikes him). So, we’ll see.

Over 57,000 comments have been left on the various vids, including some from the cast. Nerd culture social media has been posting vids and texts and threads about this. Setting aside whatever IT is, Fillion and Tudyk have handled his brilliantly. From coming up with the idea of generating buzz with each cast member appearing ‘live,’ to feeding out the vids a few days apart for a couple weeks, keeping momentum going: it has worked!

AND NOW, FOR THE PAYOFF…

I wrote all this March 14 – the day before announcement at DC’s Awesome Con. I hope it conveyed some of the excitement and buzz that was going on. How from a couple decades of it just being a yearning among fans, into genuine hope somehow, in some shape, Firefly was coming back.

It is!!!!

The news was revealed at the reunion panel, and Once We Were Spacemen released a video from Nathan (with bits from the rest of the cast). The plan is to make an animated series.

JOSS

Fillion has Whedon’s blessing. Presumably this means he won’t be involved.

THE RIGHTS

20th CenturyFox/Disney said yes to the project.

SHOW RUNNER

Tara Butters and Mac Guggenheim are married, and they met through Firefly. Their individual producer credits include Agent Carter, Law & Order: SVU, and Arrow. They’re on board.

SCRIPT

“Athenia,” written by Butters and Guggenheim. Ready to go.

ANIMATION HOUSE

They’ve got ShadowMachine on board. They did Robot Chicken.

HOME (WHERE WILL IT AIR?)

There’s one not-so-minor road bump left. No one has picked it up. 20th Century Fox or Disney could have made it their own property and greenlit it. They didn’t. I’m a big fan of Almost Paradise, from Dean Devlin (guy behind Leverage, and The Librarians), and he couldn’t find a new network when it was canceled after season two. Youtubers have stated definitively that it will be on Disney, since they own the rights. That’s an assumption. And given Nathan SPECIFICALLY said they’re looking for a home, an erroneous one. Fact check, fanboys.

TIMELINE

Fillion said that he’s not interested in post-Serenity stories. With Wash and Shepherd dead, I certainly get that. The stories will take place between the end of Firefly, and Serenity. The nine authorized novels took place in that span. I believe some of the graphic novels did, as well. Those were all hit and miss for me, so I’m not invested in them being adapted for the new series. Original stories are fine. Or picking and choosing: I wouldn’t mind some of the novels being used. The Magnificent Nine was a Firefly version of The Magnificent Seven. That’s a winner.

SOOOOO…..

I’m excited. I’m reading that Hulu decided to cancel a planned Buffy reboot (never seen that show). But it proves nothing is guaranteed. Fillion is pitching it through his production company. Clearly, it’s got some quality names attached, with lots of inside connections. And a plan is in place. And an animated series certainly seems more doable than a live-action project. Those that are disappointed it’s not a live-action reboot, are living in a fantasy world. Reality precluded that in multiple ways. An animated series, with the original cast, still isn’t a done deal. But I don’t see how we could realistically have expected more. And Fillion and company delivered on all that buildup.

A life-long D&Der, I think Vox Machina is garbage, but it found a geek home on Prime. And there’s always SyFy (yes, it’s still around).

Firefly fans have wanted something since the day it was canceled. This is as solid as could have been reasonably hoped for. Gonna be a massively missed opportunity if it doesn’t happen. But the pieces are in place to get someone to say ‘Yes’ and then air it.

 

THE COLD HARD REALITY: Firefly had poor ratings. Serenity lost money at the domestic box office, and barely broke even globally. Firefly fans have been loud over the years. But they had better show up and make this a ratings hit, if they don’t want it cancelled quickly.

Fan numbers and dollars didn’t support Firefly, or  Serenity. Those are facts, however much Fox screwed up the show, or promoting Serenity. There are no excuses for Browncoats not to make this a smash hit if it happens. A third financial failure and cancellation will establish that there is a core of fandom, but that Firefly isn’t a commercially viable project. Viewers and dollars matter. Not many properties get three chances.

 

IT’S A NEW IDES OF MARCH!

March 15 was the Ides of March. If this had been a disappointing ‘thing,’ it would have been linked to the Ides forever, like when Brutus and his buddies chopped up the first Caesar salad. Instead, if the animated series happens, it can make The Ides of March a happy day. Well, not for Caesar…

Can’t stop the signal. And the Browncoats are gearing up to support this. Let’s hope it happens.

Bob Byrne’s ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ made its Black Gate debut in 2018 and has returned every summer since.

His ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ column ran every Monday morning at Black Gate from March, 2014 through March, 2017. And he irregularly posts on Rex Stout’s gargantuan detective in ‘Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone.’ He is a member of the Praed Street Irregulars, and founded www.SolarPons.com (the only website dedicated to the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street’).

He organized Black Gate’s award-nominated ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series, as well as the award-winning ‘Hither Came Conan’ series. Which is now part of THE Definitive guide to Conan. He also organized 2023’s ‘Talking Tolkien.’

He has contributed stories to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories — Parts III, IV, V, VI, XXI, and XXXIII.

He has written introductions for Steeger Books, and appeared in several magazines, including Black Mask, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine, and Sherlock Magazine.

You can definitely ‘experience the Bobness’ at Jason Waltz’s ’24? in 42′ podcast.

A complete set (18 issues) of Avon Fantasy Reader, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and published 1947-1952

Donald A. Wollheim edited a magazine between the years 1947 to 1952 called Avon Fantasy Reader for Avon Publishers. There were 18 issues, publishing mostly reprints.

Erik Mona reviewed the first issue of Avon Fantasy Reader for Black Gate back in 2023.

I’ve never seen a copy of any of these, but in the late 1960s, George Ernsberger selected some of the best stories from the magazine for two paperback volumes. I believe there were only two. Here are some quick looks at the paperbacks, which I own and have read.

[Click the images for fantastic versions.]

The Avon Fantasy Reader and The 2nd Avon Fantasy Reader, edited by Donald A. Wollheim
and George Ernsberger (Avon Books, January and February 1969). Covers by Gray Morrow

The Avon Fantasy Reader (1969), Avon Books. Contains,

A very short Foreword by Ernsberger
“The Witch from Hell’s Kitchen” by Robert E. Howard, which features a Conanesque hero named Pyrrhas
A Northwest Smith story by C. L. Moore called “Black Thirst”
“A Victim of Higher Space,” by Algernon Blackwood
A fine story by Nictzin Dyalhis called “The Sapphire Siren” (or “The Sapphire Goddess” in Echoes of Valor III)
“The Voice in the Night” by William Hope Hodgson
“The Crawling Horror” by Thorp McClusky
“The Kelpie” by Manly Wade Wellman, which is one of his better stories

The 2nd Avon Fantasy Reader (1969): Contains “The Blonde Goddess of Bal-Sagoth by Howard, and also has stories by C. L. Moore (Northwest Smith again), Zealla Bishop, Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei, Edward Lucas White, Robert Bloch, Laurence Manning & Fletcher Pratt, and Sax Rohmer.

Back covers to The Avon Fantasy Reader and The 2nd Avon Fantasy Reader

“The Black Kiss” by Bloch was excellent, and very Lovecraftian in feel. Several of the stories had that kind of edge to them.

Overall, these two collections are more horror than Sword & Sorcery, although Howard’s two stories fit S&S. The title, “The Witch of Hell’s Kitchen” doesn’t suggest S&S but the tale’s other title perhaps does — “The House of Arabu.” I found both collections generally enjoyable.

I also love these cover illustrations, both of which are by Gray Morrow.

Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for us was  The Sword & Sorcery of John Jakes. See all of his recent posts for Black Gate here.

Arcane Arts and Cold Steel (Pulp Hero Press, December 24, 2025)

David C. Smith is a name that speaks to lovers of sword & sorcery, if not with the power of a Karl Edward Wagner, then not far behind, and if you love the genre but don’t know Dave’s name…1) Shame on you; 2) Let me get you up to speed.

A powerful writer of the genre’s last great flowering in the late 70s, Dave’s Tales of Attluma — a sunken lost continent — have spanned five decades, chronicling multiple eras in the lost land’s history — including its destruction — beginning with the epic saga of Oron and most recently, the Unforgiven-esque Sometime Lofty Towers, which I will go on record as calling the best s&s novel since the Elric-fixups, and with more emotional punch.

The Red Sonja series by David C. Smith and Richard L. Tierney (Ace Books, December 1981-May 1983). Covers by Boris Vallejo

Dave is also the man who, with another S&S giant, the late Richard L. Tierney, successfully took one of the most vapid characters in S&S — Roy Thomas’s sexing up and dumbing down of Robert E. Howard’s Red Sonya into Marvel’s Red Sonja — and wrote a brilliant, six-volume work-for-hire that are worth the sometimes high prices they command in used bookstores.

Finally, his Literary Biography of Robert E. Howard is one of the most important pieces of Howard scholarship produced in the last twenty years.

Sometime Lofty Towers by David C. Smith (Brackenbury Books,‎ December 2025). Cover by Saša Đurđević

All of which is saying, Dave knows this genre inside and out. Not just its history, but how to write it.

And that bring us to Arcane Arts and Cold Steel: Writing Sword-and-Sorcery Fiction (with a foreword by BG‘s very own John O’Neill).

Advertised as “Part master class, part genre analysis, Arcane Arts and Cold Steel is written for authors who want to write bestselling sword-and-sorcery for a modern audience.” This is true, but the publisher undersells the book’s power. Yes, the book has a lengthy appendix in which Dave speaks directly to the aspiring writer and reveals his tool kit, and an interview transcript where he speaks to both his career, his long hiatus, and the lay of the S&S writing landscape today. But the core of the book is something much more.

Tales of Attluma by David C. Smith (Pulp Hero Press,‎ December 24, 2025). Cover by Tom Barber

Beginning with a short, concise history of the genre, Dave gets into what IS sword & sorcery fiction, not by trying to create a list of characteristics (Brian Murphy and the late Howard Andrew Jones already did yeoman work here), but by the working nuts & bolts that is usually reserved for snobby lit-crit books.

Smith sees sword & sorcery as the ancestral descendent of myth cycles — Gilgamesh fighting Humbaba, Theseus & the Minotaur, the adventures of the Argonauts — as those tales are immediate and personal, whereas high fantasy is more akin to the great epics.

The Sorcerer’s Shadow by David C. Smith (Zebra Books,‎ September 1978). Cover by Doug Beekman

Like Howard Andrew Jones, he sees the immediate predecessor of the genre in the historical adventure fiction of the late 19th century and first years of the 20th century: the work of Haggard and Lamb, the pantheon of pulp writers in Adventure and Argosy, that all coalesced as a young man from west Texas synthesized those experiences, the successful John Carter and Tarzan pennings of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the weird horror he already wrote and created the characters of Solomon Kane, Kull and Conan, launching a new genre along the way.

Drawing on a century of fiction — from the foundations laid by Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, to the gritty reinventions of Karl Edward Wagner and Charles Saunders, and into the “New Edge” renaissance pioneered by Howard Andrew Jones, Smith looks at story structure: character & setting; plot & scene construction; style, voice, and tone; the use of horror & the supernatural; even the role of the inhuman as character and lens on human issues. Like a lit-crit academic, he digs deep into these topics through extensive examples from real published sources.

The Shadow of Sorcery by David C. Smith (Wildside Press, March 5, 2026). Cover by Mike Hoffman

And this is the first gold mine. Yes, of course, we see Howard, Leiber, Moorcock and Wagner being cited and examined, but there are as many — or more — examples from the writers of Smith’s generation, such as Adrian Cole, Richard Tierney and Charles Saunders, and even more from active writers today: Jason Ray Carney, Milton Davis, John Fultz, Bryn Hammond, Schuyler Hernstrom, John Hocking, the late Howard Andrew Jones, Dariel Quioge, Jason M. Waltz, Clint Werner and more.

Where the work differs from the usual lit-crit manual is that the author is actually a major figure in the genre he is analyzing and has an actual love of the material he is not afraid to show. This is not some dry, literary analysis of sword & sorcery as literature — this is a paean to the genre, to the power of *genre* fiction and *plot* to do all of the things usually reserved for pure literature.

Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery by
Brian Murphy (Pulp Hero Press,‎ January 16, 2020). Cover by Tom Barber

Along the way we get snippets of genius from a century of writing, and I guarantee you’ll find stories and writers you never knew about. But you will also see why the oft-maligned “genre” can be powerful literature in its own right, even when its first goal is — gasp — entertainment. You will also find that there is a clear pattern of what makes sword & sorcery a distinct sub-genre, the defiant “attitude” coined by Jason M. Waltz in his massive anthology Neither Beg Nor Yield, making this a perfect companion volume to Brian Murphy’s Flame & Crimson: A history of sword & sorcery.

It’s rare that we get to see a genre analyzed by one of its own luminaries, even rarer they then sit down and tell you how to hone your writing for that field. This is a delightful read that serves on many levels and deserves the praise it is receiving.

 

Nat Schachner

Nat Schachner was born on January 16, 1895 in New York. He earned a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from City College in 1915. He served in the U.S. Army during World War I in the chemical warfare service from 1917 to 1918 and, when he returned to New York he earned a Doctor of Jurisprudence from New York University in 1919, the same year he married Helen Lichtenstein. The couple would have a daughter.  He worked as an attorney until 1933 when he became a freelance writer.

On April 4, 1930, Schachner, along with G. Edward Pendray, David Lasser, and Laurence Manning, founded the American Interplanetary Society, which would be renamed the American Rocket Society four years later. The organization designed and launched liquid fueled rockets and in 1936 the organization was awarded the Prix a’Astronautique by the Société astronomique de France.

1930 also saw the start of his career as an author with the publication of “The Tower of Evil,” which he co-wrote with Arthur Leo Zagat. The two men collaborated on eleven stories published in 1931 before both turning to their solo careers as authors.

Wonder Stories Quarterly, Summer 1930. Cover by Frank R. Paul

Schachner’s first solo story was “Pirates of the Gorm,” which appeared in Astounding Stories in the May 1932 issue. His most famous story appeared in the December 1933 issue, “Ancestral Voices,” a time travel story the was an early example of the grandfather paradox, although in this case, Emmet Pennypacker travels back to the fifth century and kills a Hun who was a distant ancestor of his. Although known for the grandfather paradox, Schachner has stated that the story was a commentary on the destructiveness of the concept of racial purity that was popular in the 1930s.

The same year “Ancestral Voices” was published, Schachner published the three stories which made up “The Revolt of the Scientists,” which was set in the then near-future of 1937, indicating that a technocratic society held the keys to lifting the country out of the throes of the Great Depression.

As the Nazis and Fascism rose to power in the late 1930s, Schachner continued to address their ideas in his fiction, focusing on championing human liberties in his writing, and writing stories in which authoritarianism was ultimately defeated. By 1935, he was writing “World Gone Mad” in which Schachner warns the reader of about the pending global war, although Schachner sets it in 1990, with the U.S. on one side and the Sino-Russian alliance and United Europe on the other side. Despite coming up with interesting ideas and trying to include messages in his fiction, Schachner’s fiction rarely rises about average. Paul A, Carter, writing in The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction, described Schachner as “the earliest of pulp science fiction’s anti-Nazi Paul Reveres…”

In 1937, Schachner published Aaron Burr: A Biography, launching a new writing career for himself.  He continued to publish science fiction through 1941, with the story “Eight Who Came Back” in the November issue of Fantastic Adventures, but after that he focused on biographies, publishing books on Alexander Hamilton (1946), Thomas Jefferson (1951), and The Founding Fathers (1954).  He also published a work on Medieval universities in 1938.

Serving on the editorial committee for the American Jewish Committee, he published The Price of Liberty: A History of the American Jewish Committee in 1948. He would also go on to serve as the Director of Public Relations for the National Council of Jewish Women from 1954 until 1955.

Schachner died in Hastings-on-Hudson on October 2, 1955. He is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Hudson-on-Hastings, New York.

Steven H Silver is a twenty-one-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference numerous times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.

Cover Artists Cover #8 – Jimmy Makepeace  Cover #9 – Plastiboo  Cover #10 – Matej Kollár

Black Gate has been tracking the inception and growth of New Edge Sword & Sorcery (NESS) mgazine, starting with Micheal Harrington’s 2022 interview with Oliver Brackenbury (champion and editor of NESS), through 2023 with NESS’s first two magazine releases (also Greg Mele’s review of #1), and then into 2024 with NESS’s first book “Beating Heart and Battle Axes and its two-novella combo book Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery, and then in 2025 we covered NESS‘s publication of a NEW Jirel of Joiry tale! (2025) and we interviewed one of their key New Edge authors, Bryn Hammond.

Now in 2026, NESS brings us more with promises of Issues 8, 9, and 10!

The campaign to fund and expand them ends just days after this posting (March 14th )!  Hurry now to Backerkit to get some exclusives like a poster featuring live models in full S&S costume, discounted back issues, and a cover art postcard; also, backing unlocks more interior art and bumps author payments. If you miss out, or want some of the prior rewards from previous crowdfunding, get back issues and other NESS offerings in their shop, noting that print copies often have limited print runs.

So what is in the next three issues? We asked Oliver Brackenbury that, and his answer is below. And we had a feeling Jirel of Joiry would return, and we asked Molly Tanzer to provide a bit of perspective on the heroine.

Oliver Brakenbury on What’s New for Issues 8, 9, 10

“Loving the magazine as an object, we’re increasing the page count not only to make room for new features like our letters page, but to allow us to increase the white space for a reading experience that’s even easier on the eyes. Meanwhile the paper will be upgraded to something more textured, akin to classic paperbacks. Along with the letters page we’ll be introducing our first S&S film review, and are proud to include an author profile on Howard Andrew Jones penned by his own child, Caster Jones. Finally, our special issue for 2026 is called Timeworn Terra, expanding upon a science-fantasy tradition begun by Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, William Hope Hodgson, Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique stories and more to tell tales of futures so far they feel ancient; when magic & technology blur together; our home is transformed into a wondrously strange setting; where Earth’s days are short yet still we lust and laugh!”

“Jirel in the Forest of Night” Back Cover Illustration by Saša Đurđević Molly Tanzer’s Insights on Jirel

“I always have a blast writing the Jirel stories, and one thing in particular that’s been fun for me, when it comes to expanding on the original stories, is giving Jirel more of an historical context. We know from “Quest of the Starstone” that Jirel lived in France, around 1500. While I never want to take the focus away from Jirel’s magical adventures, in “Jirel Meets Death,” I give Castle Joiry a bit of attention… it was built atop a Roman foundation, and still has a Roman bath, and I added a few servants to make it feel more lived-in. In the upcoming “Jirel in the Forest of Night,” we begin the story with Jirel being annoyed by a proposal of marriage that would be impolitic for her to refuse. While this kind of stuff isn’t at the heart of the Jirel stories, in my opinion, it’s fun to put a character known for visiting other worlds into thorny situations here in — or at least in a version of — the real world. It gives, I think, a broader sense of who Jirel is — her character, her strengths and weaknesses, her desires, dreams… and nightmares, too!”

Bryn Hammond Highlights her new story

“In this story, Goatskin certainly goes further than she has gone before, into the unknown. And the unknown gets a grip on her in ways she has not faced. This story changes her.”

Recall, we interviewed her last September. To learn more about her Goatskin yarns, and her writing muses, check out: Interview with Bryn Hammond.

Waste Flowers and What Rough Beast? A Tale of Goatskin, written by Bryn Hammond, both with cover art from Goran Gligović Check out the Backerkit campaign by clicking here! NESS Press Release

Launching on February 12th, short story & non-fiction magazine New Edge Sword & Sorcery will be running a crowdfunding campaign on Backerkit to produce issues #8, 9, and 10 in accessible digital, classic softcover, and luxurious hardcover (w/endpage art and a bookmark ribbon!) formats. These will be released in November of 2026.

Leading the charge is JIREL OF JOIRY, returning with her third new story since the originals by her creator, legendary Weird Tales regular C.L. Moore. She was the first Sword & Sorcery heroine and, like Alice in Wonderland with a big f***ing sword, Jirel had compelling adventures in bizarre dream-logic realms, balancing a rich emotional life with terrifying struggles against dark forces! Predating Red Sonja, she & Moore were a direct influence on Robert E. Howard’s writing, and others who came after.

Authorized by the estate of C.L. Moore, “Jirel in the Forest of Night” has been written by the magnificent MOLLY TANZER (editor of Swords v. Cthulhu, author of Creatures of Charm and Hunger, and so much more).

Thirty other authors are spread across the three new issues this campaign is funding, including names like legendary S&S editor Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Bryn Hammond, and Milton Davis.

With #10, NESS looks to the impossibly far future in “TIMEWORN TERRA,” a special issue featuring stories inspired by Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique cycle, and others. Readers unfamiliar with those names will be enthralled by futures so distant they feel ancient, where sorcery has returned or technology is indistinguishable from it, where Earth is so transformed as to feel alien…yet still humanity struggles, seeks meaning, even laughs as their home world’s clock winds down.

Every story and non-fiction piece in these issues will be paired with two original B&W illustrations as soon as the crowdfund meets its first stretch goal – Double Art. The goal after that is a fund to cover shipping discounts for backers outside the United States, and from there every stretch goal is a pay raise for contributors. These goals make clear the magazine’s values of paying creators as much as they can, and making NESS financially accessible.

The magazine’s editor, Oliver Brackenbury, promises the magazine is “Made with love for the classics and an inclusive, boundary-pushing approach to storytelling,” delivering high quality writing and art in a wide variety of styles. Sword & Sorcery can be many things and still be Sword & Sorcery.

Readers should race to back the new issues before the campaign ends on March 14th, so they can benefit from crowdfund exclusives like a poster featuring live models in full S&S costume, discounted back issues, and cover art postcards.

From Feb 12th to March 14th the crowdfund is on BACKERKIT.

 

S.E. Lindberg is a Managing Editor at Black Gate, regularly reviewing books and interviewing authors on the topic of “Beauty & Art in Weird-Fantasy Fiction.” He has taken lead roles organizing the Gen Con Writers’ Symposium (chairing it in 2023), is the lead moderator of the Goodreads Sword & Sorcery Group, and was an intern for Tales from the Magician’s Skull magazine. As for crafting stories, he has contributed eight entries across Perseid Press’s Heroes in Hell and Heroika series, and has an entry in Weirdbook Annual #3: Zombies. He independently publishes novels under the banner Dyscrasia Fiction; short stories of Dyscrasia Fiction have appeared in Whetstone Amateur S&S Magazine, Swords & Sorcery online magazine, Rogues In the House Podcast’s A Book of Blades Vol I & II, DMR’s Terra Incognita, the 9th issue of Tales From the Magician’s Skull, Savage Realms Magazine, and Michael Stackpole’s S&S Chain Story 2 Project.

 

 

Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

I’ve been receiving a great many emails of late, of a kind that I’m sure many authors are getting, and I think I should probably talk about it, because it’s all such a scam. There are several flavours of scam emails that are circulating at present, of which I have personally experienced two, so let’s talk about them.

The first and most frequent email I receive are from supposed authors who enthuse about how wonderful your book is, and how much it moved them and deserves a larger audience. Some of the emails feel like their quite detailed. It’d be easy to believe that the person sending the email had indeed read it, and loved it. Here’s an example I received regarding a book of mine.

My name is [redacting as I believe they used the name of a real author], and I am a fellow author working in emotionally driven, character-centred fiction. I recently came across your Kindle edition of Human, and I felt genuinely compelled to reach out in appreciation of the emotional restraint and moral tension shaping Aleksandar’s story.

What struck me first is how deliberately you frame power as inheritance rather than advantage. Aleksandar arrives in America not as a conquering figure, but as a custodian of collapse tasked with restoring a House already hollowed by violence and history. The political weight of the Shadow Council, and the ruined legacy of House Üstrel, create a quiet but persistent pressure that follows him into every decision. Authority, in your novel, never feels clean.

I was particularly drawn to the way you explore emotional awakening inside a character who has been trained to survive without it. Aleksandar’s connection to Alicia is not written as a sudden redemption arc, but as an intrusion into something disruptive, risky, and profoundly inconvenient to the life he is meant to lead. The feelings he thought long dead do not restore him. They complicate him. That choice gives the romance its credibility and its emotional danger.

The presence of Detective Brody adds an especially compelling moral counterweight. His knowledge of what Aleksandar is and his vow of vengeance creates a rare dynamic in supernatural fiction: one where neither man is positioned as morally comfortable. Their forced proximity under betrayal and crisis becomes less about reluctant partnership and more about confronting the human cost left behind by immortal decisions.

I also admired how you position the true antagonist not as spectacle, but as consequence. The cat-and-mouse pursuit of the kidnapper is emotionally effective because it targets what Aleksandar is only just beginning to care about. The threat is not only physical it is ethical. What happens when someone who has benefited from predatory systems is suddenly required to protect what those systems would normally discard?

As authors, we both know how difficult it is to write a story that balances political hierarchy, emotional vulnerability, and violent momentum without allowing any of them to dominate the others. Human succeed because they treat conscience as seriously as it treats danger. The tension comes not only from who might survive but from who Aleksandar chooses to become while survival is still possible.

The responses from your target audiences reflect something important: readers are responding to the emotional friction at the heart of the story. Many are not simply drawn to the vampiric world or the crime-driven pacing, but to the uneasy humanity you allow to surface inside a character shaped by power, tradition, and moral erosion.

As an author, I deeply respect books that are written not simply to entertain, but to examine responsibility inside violent worlds. Human feels shaped with emotional discipline and a genuine respect for the cost of change.

If you would ever be open to exchanging thoughts on how this novel continues to reach target audiences who value morally complex supernatural fiction and emotionally grounded character transformation, I would be glad to continue the conversation simply as one author recognising another whose work carries real depth and intent.

Sounds great on the surface, right? I mean… Holy shit. It sounds like they got it.

Except, upon further reflection, it’s clear that this is just a strung-out summary of the book, likely written by an LLM. There is nothing in there that couldn’t have been gleaned from the blurb of the book. The novel itself was never read. If a close examination of the email itself doesn’t raise any flags, that last sentence absolutely should.

If you would ever be open to exchanging thoughts on how this novel continues to reach target audiences…

There it is. A hook designed to elicit a response from the receiver that eventually leads to a request for money to “help” the book reach more people. Often times, that price can be in the hundreds, of not thousands of dollars.

Honestly, the above email might have worked on me if I hadn’t received so many like it from other sources. This was the first one that tried to build rapport by posing as a fellow author. Usually they’re “book marketing specialists” or something along those lines. Those emails I can at least respect, because they don’t hide who there are and so the reasons for their emails are obvious. Like this one.

My name is Mary Jesus, and I’m a book marketer. I recently came across your novel, The Lioness of Shara Mountain, and I want to sincerely congratulate you on creating such a gripping and imaginative story.

I was particularly drawn to the dynamic between Prince Lis and the Lioness the way tradition, duty, and rebellion collide to shape their bond, set against the vivid backdrop of Shara City and the Desert Market. Your world-building, combined with the intrigue of ancient vows and shadowed pasts, makes this story both thrilling and emotionally resonant.

I would truly love to understand more about your vision behind this work:

• What inspired you to create the Hnura’i Empire and the story of the Lioness?
• Who do you most hope connects with this novel fantasy readers, adventure enthusiasts, romance fans?
• Do you see this story evolving into a series or expanding further within this world?

As a marketer, I’ve seen that rich fantasy worlds with strong character-driven narratives have incredible potential for global engagement, particularly when positioned to reach readers who love immersive storytelling and epic stakes. I’d love to better understand your long-term vision so that any promotional approach highlights both the adventure and emotional depth of your novel.

I would be thrilled to learn more about your goals for The Lioness of Shara Mountain and explore how it can reach more readers worldwide.

Thank you again for crafting such a compelling and imaginative tale.

Which was much simpler and obvious. But also for a book of mine that is not yet published, so there’s that. I greatly wonder how they would know anything about “the way tradition, duty, and rebellion collide” at all.

The emails coming from supposed authors I find particularly insidious, because it frames the interaction differently, banking on creating a trust bond that will then be exploited. It’s gross, and makes me mad. It’s super underhanded. What really sticks in my throat is the thought that there are authors who were taken in by these kinds of emails. Hell, I nearly was. It’s not right.

For writers who are just now being exposed to this sneaky, underhanded way to extract money, I have but one piece of advice. Before you jump to reply to an email like this, consider if this is something you’d write to a fellow author. Should you message another author to let them know you loved their work? Of course! That would absolutely make their day. But would you do so with the intent to discuss how their novel continues to reach their target audience?

Probably not. I doubt many authors would (unless they were maybe asking for advice, and considering how few books I sell, no one ought to be coming to me for advice on how to get books in front of readers).

Image by Gaertringen from Pixabay

The other kind of email I’ve gotten frequently (though less so), are those coming from supposed book club organisers. They follow the same pattern. They’ll gush about a particular book, and then end with a similar call to action. I had one about Daughters of Britain recently that made me so sad that I deleted it, so I can’t quote it here. But this one had a different tactic. Simply put, they would enthuse about the book, and then talk about how they were an organiser of a book club, and they’d love to use the book for their next read. Of course, through the course of the conversation, you would learn that you would have to pay (something around $560.00 in my case) to have this happen.

Let me be clear — in situations like this, money should always flow towards the author, not the other way. If any book club organisers wants to use your book, and would like to organise a video conference with club members, the writer should be paid for their time. They shouldn’t pay for it. The best way to reply to an email like this is what I wish I had done. I should have replied that I’d be happy to participate, and then offer a tiered list of appearance fees.

I am extremely fortunate that I am a naturally suspicious person, and perhaps even more so that I have no money to spare. Even if I fell for these scams, I could in no way afford any of them. Silver linings, I guess.

It is an absolute minefield out there for writers both new and veteran. Nearly every single one of these predatory schemes are designed to prey specifically on an author’s desire to be successful at their craft. Near as I can tell, not one of them can deliver on the promises they offer. They’re a scam, through and through. Don’t fall for it.

With the exception of book publicists, who are usually more straight forward about their services and why their emailing (and there is considerable debate about whether these publicists actually manage to help books sales in any appreciable way), they are scams. When in doubt, follow this golden rule: money should always flow to the author, not the other way around. This includes publishing, and public appearances (yes, even book clubs).

When S.M. Carrière isn’t brutally killing your favorite characters, she spends her time teaching martial arts, live streaming video games, and sometimes painting. In other words, she spends her time teaching others to kill, streaming her digital kills, and sometimes relaxing. Her most recent titles include Daughters of Britain, Skylark and Human. The Timbercreek Incident is free to read on Wattpad.

I’ve read 24 books so far this year, and 17 were audiobooks (we’ve already established I’m not going to say ‘books consumed.’ Listening and physically reading are distinctive, but they’re interchangeable here).

Of the 17 audiobooks, 15 were new. I re-read more than I read new books, but I’ve been using audiobooks to tackle things for the first time. 7 books were Clive Cusslers.

CLIVE CUSSLER

I first talked about Clive Cussler back in 2019. He would die a half-year later, at age 88. He had created an empire, with other authors carrying on his five sometimes-intertwined series’. I revisited his works last Summer. I’ve listened to 7 of his books so far this year, as I am well behind on my Cussler.

Isaac Bell is a turn-of-the 20th Century private eye for the Van Dorn Detective Agency. Justin Scott co-wrote the first 10. Jack Du Brul (who had been co-writing The Oregon Files), took over for the next 5. Though I liked it, for some reason the series hadn’t resonated with me in paperback. They were slow reads through the first 5. But Scott Brick reading them aloud worked for me, and I’ve listened to books 6 through 9: The Striker, The Bootlegger, The Assassin, and The Gangster. I like listening to Bell. So, audiobooks have me invested in a series that I wasn’t into in print. I will continue on. This series has run from 2007 through 2025.

The Oregon Files are the only techno-thrillers I’ve ever gotten into. I’ve not read a single Tom Clancy book. Craig Dirgio ‘co-wrote’ the first 2, succeeded by Jack Du Brul for the next 7. Boyd Morrison took over for 7 books, with Mike Maden having written the last 4 in this 19-book series. I’m still in the Morrison phase, listening to books 12 (Typhoon Fury) and 13 (Shadow Tyrants). These are different from any other series I read, and I like them. I’ll continue on. This series has run from 2003 through 2025.

The Fargo Adventures feature married treasure hunters named Sam and Remi Fargo. These feel a little less intense than the other series’. As with Isaac Bell, listening to the books works better for me than actually reading them. Grant Blackwood wrote the first 4. Thomas Perry took over for the next 2. Russell Blake then wrote 2, and Robin Burcell has written the last 6 in the 13 book series. I listened to book 5 (The Mayan Secrets). This is my fourth-favorite series, just below Isaac Bell. But it’s WELL above Dirk Pitt. I’ll check out Russell Blake here soon. This series has run from 2009 through 2023.

My favorite series of them all feature Kurt Austin and the NUMA Files. There are 21 books, and I’ve read somewhat over half. I haven’t listened to any this year, but I should try to get caught up some on those, as well. I enjoy reading Austin in book form and will likely do that again. This series has run from 1999 through 2024.

As I’ve said before, I don’t read Cussler’s foundational series, featuring Dirk Pitt. There have been two movies from it, with Matthew McConaughey’s Sahara a big screen action flick. There have been 27 novels.

Starting with book 18, his son, Dirk Cussler, began writing them. He’s not as bad as Anne Hillerman (whose last name is the only qualification she has for continuing father Tony’s Navajo Tribal Police series. She is SO bad I quit mid-book and abandoned the series. She’s a disgrace), but I read the first two Dirk Cussler books, and gave up. I might try the next one after I’m 100% caught up on the other series’, but I doubt it. I didn’t enjoy them, and there’s too much good stuff out there to read and re-read. Including the earlier Dirk Pitt books. This series has run from 1973 through 2023.

Scott Brick narrates the books from all four series,’ which is unfortunate. There are multiple characters in each one, including a large team for The Oregon Files. Having the same person reading all the books kind of runs together. Brick is okay in each, but some variety would be nice.

JAMES LEE BURKE

Back in 2022, I talked about my favorite audiobook narrators, and Will Patton was one of them. He was the perfect choice to read James Lee Burke’s Cajun Noir featuring Dave Robicheaux. I am well behind, and I just read 20210’s The Glass Rainbow in hardback. Burke is a superb writer. One of the best of my lifetime. I’ve got 6 to go to get current, with the latest just having come out last month. I wrote about Tommy Lee Jones’ labor of love to bring Robicheaux to the screen.

Unfortunately, most of the Patton audiobooks still available are abridged. I’m not an abridged fan. Most of the books are now read by Mark Hammer. I don’t like his recordings at all. I re-listened to book 1 (The Neon Rain) -which I had by Patton – while I read The Glass Rainbow. Then I tried to listen to Hammer reading book 2 (Heaven’s Prisoners) and I simply quit, moving on to a Firefly audiobook. He just sounds like a boring old man. I won’t be listening to any more Hammer readings. It was disappointing. Wish I still had some of my Will Patton cassettes.

NIKKI HEAT

I talked about Castle, and Nikki Heat, back in January. I listened to books 7 (Driving Heat), 8 (High Heat), 9 (Heat Storm), and 10 (Crashing Heat). 8 and 9 were definitely the low points of the entire series, but it recovered in book 10 to close things out well enough. Overall, worth reading. As I said in the prior post, a female narrator would have made a lot more sense.

CASTLE PERILOUS

And back in February, I talked about revisiting this whimsical eighties fantasy series by John DeChancie. I listened to books 4 (Castle War!) and 5 (Castle Murder), then dove into Clive Cussler. I’ve got the rest of the series, from the 2025 Audible Big Sale, so I’ll listen to more.

MISC

I listened to some Douglas Adams (Life, the Universe, and Everything), and the two ‘radio play readings’ of Red Dwarf, by Chris Barrie. He does a really good job, and they’re as good as the audiobooks of the novel. Sadly, co-creator Rob Grant died on February 25.

I listened to the ten Firefly audiobooks a few years ago. They’re a mixed bag: some are good, some not-so-much. One of my favorites is book two, The Magnificent Nine, which is a Jayne story. And essentially a Firefly version of The Magnificent Seven. This was written by Sherlock Holmes – and Conan – author, James Lovegrove. James Anderson Foster sounds kinda like Nathan Fillion, and I think he was a good choice. I’d start your Firefly listen with this one. Lovegrove had to use a ‘story concept’ by someone else for book one, and it’s a weaker entry. Four of the first five are among the best in the series. I’m not as keen on the succeeding authors.

Prior Audio Posts:
What I’ve Been Listening To: November (II) 2025 (Dictator, Don’t Panic, Mistletoe Murders, Sword of Shannara)
What I’ve Been Listening To: November, 2025 (Conspirata, Stacy Keach, Gideon Lowry)
What I’ve Been Listening To: August, 2025 (Middlebridge Mysteries, Unlicensed, The Big Lie, 64th Man)
What I’ve Been Listening To: June, 2025 (Eve Ronin, Thieves World, SPQR, Egil & Nix, the annual sale)
What I’ve Been Listening To: February, 2025 (Isaac Steele, Sharpe & Walker, SPQR, Steven Saylor, The Trojan War)
What I’ve Been Listening To: November, 2024 (Mistletoe Murders, The Caine Mutiny, Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting)
What I’ve Been Listening To: September, 2025 Desert of Souls)
What I’ve Been Listening To: August, 2024 (Part II) (Leaphorn and Chee, Tony Hillerman, Eve Ronin)
What I’ve Been Listening To: August, 2024 (Egil & Nix, Caleb York Westerns, Malazan)
What I’ve Been Listening To: July, 2024 (The Black Company, SPQR, Charles Willeford, Thieves World)
What I’ve Been Listening To: September 2022 (Robert R. McCammon, Ian C. Esslemont, Dirk Gently)
May I Read You This Book? – (My favorite audiobook narrators)

Bob Byrne’s ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ made its Black Gate debut in 2018 and has returned every summer since.

His ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ column ran every Monday morning at Black Gate from March, 2014 through March, 2017. And he irregularly posts on Rex Stout’s gargantuan detective in ‘Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone.’ He is a member of the Praed Street Irregulars, and founded www.SolarPons.com (the only website dedicated to the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street’).

He organized Black Gate’s award-nominated ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series, as well as the award-winning ‘Hither Came Conan’ series. Which is now part of THE Definitive guide to Conan. He also organized 2023’s ‘Talking Tolkien.’

He has contributed stories to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories — Parts III, IV, V, VI, XXI, and XXXIII.

He has written introductions for Steeger Books, and appeared in several magazines, including Black Mask, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine, and Sherlock Magazine.

You can definitely ‘experience the Bobness’ at Jason Waltz’s ’24? in 42′ podcast.

From beside the queen Gawain
to the king did then incline:
‘I implore with prayer plain
that this match should now be mine.’

Somehow, I’ve never read Prof. Tolkien’s, let alone anyone’s, translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14th cent.), an English poem written by an unknown poet. Thinking on it, I  know there’s a cheesy looking movie, Sword of the Valiant, from the eighties starring Miles O’Keeffe and Sean Connery, but it was only David Lowery’s 2021 The Green Knight and its critical acclaim that made me think it was maybe time to read the poem. Now I have. Additionally, and most valuable to me wrestling with my understanding of the poem, I’ve also read the professor’s 1953 WP Ker lecture on work.

The poem recounts the temptations of Sir Gawain, youngest member of King Arthur’s Round Table, as he attempts to meet the suicidal obligation he accepted when he entered a contest with a mysterious green knight. More precisely, as told, it’s about the conflict between chivalrous virtues  of honor and courtesy and, specifically religious, morality.

Gawain was written in Middle English, the evolution of the language used between the Conquest in 1066 and the late 15th century. Gawain, son of Morgause, one of King Arthur’s half-sisters, is a major figure in many of the assorted Arthur tales. His roots descend back into older Welsh tales, where he was known as Gwalchmei. Pre-Christian elements, including the Beheading Game and the Wild Hunt, are integral parts of the story, despite the tale’s overt Christianity. The Beheading Game is a recurrent motif that tracks back to at least the Irish tale Fled Bricrenn featuring the hero Cú Chulainn and the Wild Hunt occurs across various Northern European myth cycles.

The poem begins with a recounting of Britain’s founding by Brutus of Troy. Noble as he was, young King Arthur of Camelot was nobler still. One Christmas season, as Arthur’s knights were celebrating with a games and contests, a strange figure entered the hall.

For hardly had the music but a moment ended,
and the first course in the court as was custom been served,
when there passed through the portals a perilous horseman,
the mightiest on middle-earth in measure of height,
from his gorge to his girdle so great and so square,
and his loins and his limbs so long and so huge,
that half a troll upon earth I trow that he was,
but the largest man alive at least I declare him;
and yet the seemliest for his size that could sit on a horse,
for though in back and in breast his body was grim,
both his paunch and his waist were properly slight,
and all his features followed his fashion so gay
in mode;
for at the hue men gaped aghast
in his face and form that showed;
as a fay-man fell he passed,
and green all over glowed.

Even his stallion is green. He has arrived at Camelot, he declares, to see how brave the knights of the Round Table really are. Not in combat, though, as they are “but beard less children.” No, what the Green Knight wants is to strike blow for blow with his great axe anyone brave enough to accept his challenge.  For playing along, he will let that person keep the axe.

When no one steps forward, King Arthur, himself, raises his voice to take on the Green Knight, himself. At once, Gawain steps in to put himself between the king and any harm that might befall him. In a sharp bit of commentary, Gawain calls out his own weaknesses even while upbraiding his fellow knights for their apparent cowardice.

For I find it unfitting, as in fact it is held,
when a challenge in your chamber makes choices so exalted,
though you yourself be desirous to accept it in person,
while many bold men about you on bench are seated:
on earth there are, I hold, none more honest of purpose,
no figures fairer on field where fighting is waged.
I am the weakest, I am aware, and in wit feeblest,
and the least loss, if I live not, if one would learn the truth.

If his the knight’s green cast hadn’t hinted that strange things were at hand, it’s made abundantly clear once Gawain delivers his blow and lops the challenger’s head from his shoulders. Just because he’s headless, it doesn’t mean Arthur’s champion is off the hook. Never faltering, the Green Knight reaches for his head and holds it aloft to the king and his household.

For the head in his hand he held it up straight,
towards the fairest at the table he twisted his face,
and it lifted its eyelids and looked at them broadly,
and made such words with its mouth as may be recounted.
‘See thou get ready, Gawain, to go as thou vowedst,
and as faithfully seek till thou find me, good sir
as thou hast promised in this place in the presence of
these knights.
To the Green Chapel go thou, and get thee, I charge thee,
such a dint as thou has dealt — indeed thou has earned
a nimble knock in return on New Year’s morning!

One might think Gawain would set forth as soon as able, but he doesn’t, instead remaining with Arthur until All Hallows. As he prepares to leave, the poet provides a detailed description of the young knight’s livery. On both his baldric and his shield is a pentangle, a five pointed star.

First faultless was he found in his five sense,
and next in his five fingers he failed at no time,
and firmly on the Five Wounds all his faith was set
that Christ received on the cross, as the Creed tells us,
and wherever the brave man into battle come,
on this beyond all things was his earnest thought:
that ever from the Five Joys all his valour he gained
that to Heaven’s courteous Queen once came from her
Child.

Tolkien describes this as instrumental to understanding the poem’s Christian context, as it represents the highest Christian ideals, the things Gawain aspires to embody and uphold:

For the significance that the pentangle is to bear in this poem is made plain — plain enough , that is, in general purport: it is to betoken ‘perfection’ indeed, but perfection in religion (the Christian faith), in piety and morality, and the ‘courtesy’ that flows therefrom into human relations; perfection in details of each, and a perfect and unbroken bond between the higher and lower planes.

For nearly two months, Gawain roams the land in search of the Green Chapel and its lord. Traveling across the wild countryside in search of the Green Chapel, his adventures, while extensive by any hero’s standard, are described in only a few sentences. They are merely something Gawain endures prior to the real struggle he must face in fulfilling his obligation to the Green Knight.

At every wading or water on the way that he passed
he found a foe before him, save at few for a wonder;
and so foul were they and fell that fight he must needs.
So many a marvel in the mountains he met in those lands
that ‘twould be tedious the tenth part to tell you thereof.
At whiles with worms he wars, and with wolves also,
at whiles with wood-trolls that wandered in the crags,
and with bulls and with bears and boars, too, at times;
and with ogres that hounded him from the heights of the fells.

Only a few days before New Year’s Day, Gawain comes across a castle, “the castle most comely that ever a king possessed,” deep in the wild forest. He is welcomed there by the lord and his wife. Aside from the lord and lady and their servants, there is a mysterious ugly old woman in the castle, whom everyone treats with great respect.  They are honored and pleased to welcome such a notable as Arthur’s knight. On hearing of his quest, the lord tells him nearby is a path that lead to the chapel which is only two miles away. He also suggests that Gawain rest and recover until New Year’s Day, an offer the knight readily accepts. The lord also proposes a bargain; he will go hunting while the knight rests. At day’s end, the lord will give him whatever he catches in return for whatever gift the knight might receive during the day. Again, Gawain accepts the offer.

The poem continues the next morning with a detailed accounting of the lord’s hunt for deer in the forest. Tolkien points out that this is a realistic portrayal of a lord’s necessary activity during the winter as well as a providing a realistic reason for him to be away from the castle. That is important for the next part of the Gawain’s story.

It is on the very next morning that the real nature of Gawain’s struggle is revealed. What follows are three days of escalating temptation for Gawain. He is awoken by the castle’s lady with clearly lascivious intent. Her servants and maids are still asleep, and she’s “the door closed and caught with a clasp that is strong.”

To my body will you welcome be
of delight to take your fill;
for need constraineth me
to serve you, and I will.’

He is able to hold her off, though he finds doing so without being discourteous difficult. Nonetheless, he resists her persistent ardor and she retreats after giving him a single kiss. He dresses at once and proceeds to Mass.

She was an urgent wooer,
that lady fair of face;
the knight with speeches pure
replied in every case.

‘Madam,’ said he merrily, ‘Mary reward you
For I have enjoyed, i n good faith, your generous favour,
and much honour have had else from others’ kind deeds ;
but as for the courtesy they accord me, since my claim is not  equal,
the honour is your own, who are ever well-meaning.’

The lord returns from his hunt with supply of venison which he gives to Gawain. When the knight gives him a kiss in return, he asks him “where you won this same wealth by the wits you posses.” Gawain responds ‘That was not the covenant,’ quoth he. ‘Do not question me more.”

This is the template for the remaining two days, but in each, the risk for Gawain increases. The lady becomes more forward and direct with each new morning. The young knight finds it increasingly difficult to hold off her advances, again, remaining courteous, faithful to the lord’s hospitality, and true to Christian values.

This, Tolkien explains, is the real heart of the poem and Gawain’s challenge: “The author is chiefly interested in the competition between ‘courtesy’ and virtue (purity and loyalty); he shows us their increasing divergence, and shows us Gawain at crisis of the temptation recognizing this and choosing virtue rather than courtesy, yet preserving a graciousness of manner and a gentleness of speech belonging to the true spirit of courtesy.” He fins this made clear in the following lines.

for she, queenly and peerless, pressed him so closely,
led him so near the line, that at last he must needs
either refuse her with offence or her favours there take.
He cared for his courtesy, lest a caitiff he proved,
yet more for his sad case, if he should sin commit
and to the owner of the house, to his host, be a traitor.
‘God help me l ‘ said he. ‘Happen that shall not !’

On the second day she is more forceful and he ends up receiving two kisses. On the third, it’s three kisses, but he doesn’t escape with quite intact. The lady presses on Gawain a green girdle she wove that will prevent any who wear it to be killed “by any cunning of hand.” Prompted as much by courtesy as fear, he accepts it. More important, he does not present it to the lord as one of the gifts he received that day, instead only giving him three kisses.

As I reach the poem’s climax, I’ve realized I haven’t said anything about my own reactions to it. I guess I’d have to say I’m swayed by Prof. Tolkien’s interpretation. In the poem’s final stanzas, it’s made clear that not only was the Green Knight’s challenge a game, but everything in the tale is a game. That is, the lady’s attempted seduction of Gawain is never real, only an effort to force him to fail to uphold his professes virtues, broken on the contradictions between his obligations to the lord, the lady, and Christian morality. It was all planned as an attack on Arthur, Guinevere, and the Round Tables and its knights. I didn’t have to be swayed very much, as the poet’s intent seems fairly clear, nonetheless, I appreciate his explication.

There’s real power in the poem, as I think is clear from lines I’ve included. The moments of weirdness serve as a connection to the deeper stories that run back to very roots of myths and legends. But there’s also a real, psychological depth to Gawain that’s often lacking in characters from fairytales and the like. There’s real anguish in his struggle to simultaneously maintain his honor and his virtue. It isn’t a simple morality play, but possessed of real human complexity. It’s not without value studying Gawain’s efforts in this parlous age.

Confessing his sins the night before, on New Year’s Day, Gawain sets out. Instead of the expected chapel, the Green Knight’s abode is a cave set in an earthen mound, with more hint of Devil than Christ to it. What follows is the direst test of the young knight as he braves the “Danish axe newly dressed the dint to return, with cruel cutting-edge curved along the handlefiled on a whetstone, and four feet in width” of his challenger.

When the Green Knight swings his axe, Gawain flinches. Reproached for cowardice, a second strike is delivered, though this stops short of touching Gawain’s neck. When Gawain demands a third, true blow, he is rewarded with a slight wound to his neck. At this point, all is revealed.

The Green Knight is none other than the lord of the castle and the whole thing was planned by the old woman at the castle. She is, in fact, Morgan le Fay, Arthur’s half-sister and Gawain’s aunt. She hoped the sight of the Green Knight’s talking severed head would scare Guinevere to death and that one of Arthur’s knights would fail to maintain his virtue. He only wounded Gawain at all because he hid his receipt of the girdle.

This last breaks Gawain. He believes he has failed, giving into cowardice and not remaining true to his promise to the lord, condemning himself: ‘Cursed be ye, Coveting, and Cowardice also I In you is vileness, and vice that virtue destroyeth.’ No one else, though, agrees. The lord laughs and rejects this as Gawain, save for valuing his life a little too much, has met the other challenges perfectly and extends an invitation to his New Year’s celebrations. On returning to Arthur, the king and his knights also reject Gawain’s self-denouncement, instead, choosing the green girdle as a reminder of Gawain’s adventure and virtue.

I need to think about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight some more and reread it a few more times before I come to anymore conclusions on in it. As with Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf, I enjoyed reading this and found it flowed and moves with a nice rhythm. There are two other poems in the collection I have, Pearl and Sir Orfeo, which I haven’t read yet, but will the next time around.

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part One

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Two – The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Three — The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Four — The Return of the King by JRR Tolkien

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Five — From the Beginning: The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Six — Bored of the Rings by Henry N. Beard & Douglas C. Kenney

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Seven — The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Eight — The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien

Grimmer Than Grim: The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien

Talking Tolkien: Of Such a Sort Should a Man Be – Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary by J.R.R. Tolkien

Fletcher Vredenburgh writes a column each first Sunday of the month at Black Gate, mostly about older books he hasn’t read before. He also posts at his own site, Stuff I Like when his muse hits him

Remains, issues 4 and 4. Cover art by Richard Wagner

There are readers who, like me, prefer dark fiction in short form, because their suspension of disbelief is too brief to sustain — with a few exceptions — a full novel.

For people like us here’s a real treat: the new magazine/anthology Remains, edited by Andy Cox and illustrated by Richard Wagner, both well known for their previous work with the mythical Black Static magazine.

The first two issues are already sold out, but volume 3 ( published in late 2025) and the brand new volume 4 are available to entertain and disquiet.

Art for “Hiroshima Was Another Word For Love Then” by Andrew Hoo, from Issue 3, by Richard Wagner

My favorite stories from vol 3 are the following:

“Atrophy Wife” by Gary McMahon, a superb, deeply unsettling tale where two boys discover the headless body of a murdered girl

“Hiroshima Was Another Word for Love Then” by Andrew Hook, an insightful, slightly sad piece depicting the fleeting encounter between a man and a woman whose lives will be separated forever

“Gehenna” by Steve Rasnic Tem, an engrossing, moving story featuring a cancer patient riding the bus to his chemo infusions

The list of contributors includes Allison Littlewood, Danny Rhodes, James Sallis and Stephen Hargadon.

Art for “Loon” by Danny Rhodes, from Issue 3, by Robert Wagner

From volume 4 my personal choices are

“Station to Station” by Stephen Bacon, a fascinating, life-long trip in the network of London Underground in search of a friend lost forever

“Development Conversation” by Stephen Hargadon, a very unusual, fascinating piece of weird fiction set in an office where unexpected changes are going to take place

Other contributors are: Sean Padraic Byrne, Kay Vandail, James Sallis, Annie Neugebauer, Craig Bernardini, Steve Toase and John Possidente.

Copies are $10 each in the US, and a 4-issue subscription is $33. Order directly from the Remains website.

Mario Guslandi was born in Milan, Italy, where he currently lives. He became addicted to horror and supernatural fiction (too) many years ago, after accidentally reading a reprint anthology of stories by MR James, JS Le Fanu, Arthur Machen etc. Most likely the only Italian who regularly reads (and reviews) dark fiction in English, he has contributed over the years to various genre websites such as Horrorworld, Hellnotes, The British Fantasy Society, The Agony Column and many more. See all his recent reviews for us here.

Theodora Du Bois

Theodora McCormick was born on September 14, 1890 in Brooklyn, New York. Her father died when she was a year old and she was raised by her mother and stepfather. She attended the Barnard School for Girls in Manhattan and the Halsted School in Yonkers. Although she wanted to attend Vassar College and was accepted in 1909, her parents did not support her attending the school. Her plans to go anyway were dashed when she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and she found herself in a TB sanitarium instead. Eventually, in 1916, she enrolled in the Dartmouth Summer School for Drama.

While in the sanitarium, McCormick began writing poetry, although most of her poetry was written during this time and after she was healthy she focused on various forms of prose writing. In 1918, she married Delafield Du Bois and took the name Theodora Du Bois. Theodora gave birth to a daughter, also named Theodora, in 1919 and in 1922 had a son, Eliot.

The Devil’s Spoon

Perhaps best known as a playwright and mystery author, she wrote historical romances using the name Theodora McCormick, and other works of fiction and plays as by Theodora Du Bois. Her first published play, The Sleeping Beauty: A Play With or Without Pageantry, was first published in 1919 and, as the name implies, is a fantasy. Her first book, Amateur and Educational Dramatics was written with coauthors Evelyne Hilliard and Kate Oglebay and was published in 1917.

She began publishing fiction in 1920 with the short story “Thursday and the King and Queen,” which appeared in Woman’s Home Companion. She branched out to novels in 1930 with The Devil’s Spoon about a devil who possesses a human in order to fight against Satan’s plans to dominate the world (originally published as a novel, it would be reprinted in the June 1948 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries). Du Bois would return to the theme of possession in 1948 with The Devil and Destiny.

Later works, such as Murder Strikes and Atomic Unit and High Tension fell into the science fiction/thriller genre and other works during the 1940s and 50s also tackled the cold war, with Du Bois being dropped by her publisher in 1954 after her novel Seeing Red took on the issue of McCarthyism.

In addition to her dramas, mystery novels, historical romances, and science fiction works, Du Bois also wrote numerous juvenile works, beginning with Rocks and Rills: A Cartoon in Three Dimensions in 1932 through The High King’s Daughter in 1966.

When Delafield Du Bois worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II, the couple formed a committee at Yale University to help academics from Oxford and Cambridge who found themselves in the United States  during the war. Delafield died in 1965.

Titles published using the McCormick name included the medieval novel The Emerald Crown, the American Revolution novel Freedom’s Way, and the Irish novel The Love of Fingin O’Lea.

Du Bois died on February 1, 1986 in New York. She is buried in Moravian Cemetery in New Dorp, New York.

Steven H Silver is a twenty-one-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference numerous times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.

Unnatural Death by Dorothy Sayers (Avon Books, 1964)

“I know who you are now,” said Nurse Philliter, slowly. “You — you gave evidence against Sir Julian Freke. In fact, you traced the murder to him, didn’t you?”

In Unnatural Death, the third Wimsey novel, Sayers again makes medical issues vital to the plot and the mystery. In this case, Wimsey learns of his case entirely by accident: He and his close friend Charles Parker are talking about crime over dinner, and Wimsey tells Parker that, unlike police officers, who have a public duty to voice their suspicions, doctors have no such duty and can get in trouble by doing so.

This is overheard by a doctor seated at a nearby table, who tells them a story of his own experience with doing so: A rich old woman in his care died unexpectedly — she was suffering from a terminal cancer, but that was not the cause — and he found the death puzzling and asked to do a post-mortem, which found no cause of death, followed by a chemical analysis, which revealed nothing either.

[Click the images for unnatural-sized versions.]

Unnatural Death (Bourbon Street, January 7, 2014)

This sets us up for a neat medical mystery, which in fact has a solution that’s fairly widely known now, but that apparently was obscure a century ago. The doctor tells the other two that the local gossip that followed from this ruined his practice, and he had to move away and start over elsewhere.

Intrigued, Wimsey offers to look into the case, but the doctor turns him down, remarking with satisfaction that Wimsey doesn’t know his name and won’t be able to pursue the matter. Wimsey decides to do so anyway, sends the doctor, Dr. Edward Carr, a short note, and says to Parker, “If you want to be immune from silly letters, Charles, don’t carry your monomark in your hat.”

Unnatural Death by Dorothy Sayers (New English Library, 1976)

(According to Wiktionary, a monomark is a short alphanumeric sequence used as a postal address, brought into use by a British mail forwarding company two years before Unnatural Death was published. Naturally Lord Peter would have spotted and memorized the monomark!)

In an early chapter, Wimsey takes Parker to meet a woman whom he describes as a friend. Parker takes this to be a euphemism, and is embarrassed, privately ironic about how “they always seem to think it’s different,” and trying not to show the disapproval he feels. Then he and the readers meet “a thin, middle-aged woman, with a sharp, sallow face and very vivacious manner.”

Unnatural Death (Avon Books, 1964)

Miss Climpson is, as Wimsey says, an old maid (an increasing problem in the years after the Great War) and, as Parker says, a sort of inquiry agent; in Wimsey’s words, “She asks questions which a young man could not put without a blush.”

In fact, she is part of an agency which Wimsey has created and is funding, which amounts to his version of the Baker Street Irregulars (with single women instead of street urchins!), and he sends her off to find which town Dr. Carr formerly practiced in and who was his deceased patient there — the first stage of her active role in the entire investigation.

At this point the story acquires a subtext that Sayers never makes explicit. The patient was Agatha Dawson — Miss Agatha Dawson, for she never married; she lived most of her life with her cousin, Miss Clara Whittaker, to whom she was deeply attached. Neither of them cared for marriage; Clara supported them as a successful horse breeder, and wanted nothing to do with men, except on matters of business.

Unnatural Death, back cover (Bourbon Street, January 7, 2014)

After Clara’s death, her niece, Mary Whitaker, a trained nurse who steps in to manage Miss Dawson’s care, is also, to Miss Climpson’s eye, “not of the marrying sort,” and is much admired by a younger woman, Vera Findlater, of whom Miss Climpson thinks “It is natural for a schoolgirl… in a young woman of twenty-two it is thoroughly undesirable”; the two have plans to buy a chicken farm together.

Finally, Wimsey has two interviews with yet another woman, Miss Forrest, at the second of which she attempts to seduce him, but when he takes the lure and kisses her, she involuntarily shudders away in revulsion.

It’s a point in Sayers’s favor, I think, that she doesn’t have one stereotype of “the love that dare not speak its name” (however politely hinted at) but shows everything from lifelong devotion to naïveté to cynical manipulation. What’s unnatural, in this novel, is not one woman’s passion for another, but murder.

Unnatural Death (HarperCollins, 1995)

Finding out about the two cousins gives Wimsey and Parker a start on discovering the family relations (some American editions were titled The Dawson Pedigree), and also meeting the solicitor who took over from their retired former solicitor. This brings up some complex issues that follow from a recent change in the law (I imagine Sayers reading about the change and thinking that it could be a motive for murder) and that supply a motive.

The story supports one of Wimsey’s ideas: That one crime can lead to more crimes as the criminal tries to cover up the first. The investigation heats up with the death of Bertha Gotobed, formerly a servant of Miss Dawson, and with the death of Vera Findlater. All this builds up to a dramatic climactic scene and to the revelation of how the original death was brought about.

Unnatural Death (Perennial Mystery Library, 1987)

Sayers also shows Wimsey troubled by his own involvement in the case: asking the vicar of the town where Miss Dawson and Miss Whittaker lived for moral advice on a “hypothetical” case; thinking that his own investigations may have created the motive for two more murders; and in the end, “cold and sick” at the outcome. Inner conflict over his own vocation of criminal investigation makes him an increasingly complex character, and makes this a psychological novel as well as a murder mystery.

William H. Stoddard is a professional copy editor specializing in scholarly and scientific publications. As a secondary career, he has written more than two dozen books for Steve Jackson Games, starting in 2000 with GURPS Steampunk. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife, their cat (a ginger tabby), and a hundred shelf feet of books, including large amounts of science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novels.

Marvel’s Conan paperbacks: Conan the Barbarian: The Official Marvel Comics Adaptation of the Movie by Michael Fleisher and John Buscema (1982), and Stan Lee Presents Conan the Barbarian, Volumes 2 and 3, by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith (Ace Books, 1978). Covers by Earl Norem and Barry Windsor-Smith

I don’t systematically collect comic book materials but I pick up Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard related stuff when I see it. Found all three of the Marvel paperbacks above at various book sales.

Conan the Barbarian: The Official Marvel Comics Adaptation of the Movie stayed true to the movie plot. Being a Howard purist, I wasn’t a big fan of the movie when it came out, but it’s grown on me over time. I just don’t really think of it as a Howard Conan movie. Earl Norem did the cover for this one, based on movie images.

The Stan Lee Presents Conan volumes are in color. I don’t have Volume 1 and likely won’t be getting it since it lists at 250 bucks on Amazon, but here are 2 and 3, which I bought for a buck or so. Both were written by Roy Thomas (1940 – ) and drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith (1949 – ).

[Click the images for Conan-sized versions.]

Conan the Barbarian #4 & 5, by Roy Thomas and Barry Barry Windsor-Smith
(Marvel Comics, April and May 1971). Covers by Barry Windsor-Smith

Volume #2 collects issues 4-6 of Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian comic, including an adaptation of Howard’s Conan story called “The Tower of the Elephant,” a story expanded from Howard’s poem “Zukala’s Hour,” which did not feature Conan, and a final piece called “Devil Wings Over Shadizar,” which is a new story not directly connected to Howard. It was nominated in 1971 for best story by “The Academy of Comic-Book Arts,” and is interesting for its use of two characters named Fafnir and Blackrat.

Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian 6 (June 1971). Cover by Barry Windsor-Smith

Fafnir = big man, dressed as a barbarian, heavy red beard. Blackrat = little man, called rodent, more fancy in dress and in swordsmanship. Remind you of anyone? Maybe the story should have been called “Ill Met in Shadizar.”

Volume #3 reprints issues 7-9 of Conan the Barbarian, including “The Lurker Within,” which was adapted from Howard’s “God in the Bowl,” a Conan piece, “The Keepers of the Crypt,” loosely based on a Howard synopsis, and “The Garden of Fear,” which transforms Howard’s story of the same name into a Conan tale. The original featured the character of James Allison, who is remembering his past life as Hunwulf the Wanderer.

Conan the Barbarian #7-9, by Roy Thomas and Barry Barry Windsor-Smith
(Marvel Comics, July-September 1971). Covers by Barry Windsor-Smith

The stories were enjoyable. Roy Thomas, who I briefly met, seemed to have a pretty good feel for Conan, and Windswor-Smith has long been identified with his Conan art.

Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for us was a review of two Sword & Sorcery anthologies, Savage Heroes and Heroic Fantasy. See all of his recent posts for Black Gate here.

The 13th Warrior (Touchstone Pictures, August 27, 1999) The 13th Warrior (102 minutes; 1999)

Written by William Wisher and Warren Lewis. Directed by John McTiernan

Based on the novel, Eaters of the Dead, by Michael Crichton, who also served as a producer and uncredited director.

What is it?

A version of the Beowulf story, as witnessed by an aristocratic Arab who accompanies a dozen Viking warriors into battle against a mysterious army of cannibalistic cavemen.

Noteworthy

Touchstone Films produced The 13th Warrior as a vehicle for star Antonio Banderas, bringing in John McTiernan (Die Hard) to direct. When test audiences proved unhappy with the results, famed writer Michael Crichton, who had penned the novel on which it was based, took over production. He reshot numerous scenes and took a broadsword to what McTiernan had already filmed. He even went so far as to toss out the… let us be charitable and say “interesting” musical score by Graeme Revell and replace it with unquestionably great new compositions by Jerry Goldsmith. The result is a film that is uneven in places, as one might expect from having multiple cooks in the kitchen, but spectacular in others.

The studio shelved the finished product for roughly a year, before unceremoniously shoving it out under a different title and with little fanfare to theaters in the summer of 1999. There it was promptly given a Viking funeral at the box office by bigger fish such as The Matrix, The Phantom Menace and The Mummy, despite it being better than any of those.

Omar Sharif and Antonio Banderas in The 13th Warrior

Banderas plays the central character, Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan, known to his Viking cohorts as “the Arab” and “Ibn.” The film also stars Scandinavian actors Dennis Storhoi and Vladimir Kulich, with Diane Venora as the queen – one of the very few female characters in the movie – and Tony Curran (Gladiator; League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) as one of the Vikings. The great Omar Sharif (Lawrence of Arabia; Dr Zhivago) appears briefly in the opening scenes as an aide to Banderas’s character.

Michael Crichton wrote the novel Eaters of the Dead in 1976 as a “found manuscript” supposedly composed by Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan, a real person who actually did journey up the Volga River and encounter Vikings during Medieval times. In Crichton’s fictional telling, the king of those Vikings is called Buliwyf, better known today as Beowulf. Fahdlan travels with them and documents their adventures.

Quick and Dirty Summary

An exiled Arab diplomat (and dandy) finds himself among a group of Vikings led by King Buliwyf. He is chosen to accompany them on a journey to save a distant Viking kingdom from attack. That kingdom is menaced by a mysterious, perhaps supernatural force called “The Wendol.” (“Stop saying it,” warns one survivor of their attack, who fears even the mention of their name.)

The Wendol turn out to be a group of mysterious, cannibalistic cave-dwellers. Crichton cleverly has them stand in for the “Grendel” creature of Beowulf fame, and in his novel suggests that they are from some other branch of humanity; perhaps the last of the Neanderthals, surviving into Medieval times.

During his travels and travails with the Vikings, Fahdlan grows tremendously as a warrior and as a man. He learns the Viking language, improves his fighting skills, and impresses the rugged men around him with his growing tenacity, courage and determination.

They fight off attacks by the Wendol against the Viking village, battle them deep in their creepy underground caves, and face them one last time on the surface.

At last, Ibn Fahdlan sails away for home, probably destined to chronicle the story of Beowulf. He has earned the friendship and the respect of the Vikings and, more importantly, his own self-respect.

Fantasy/SF/Sword & Sorcery Elements

Some would argue that Fahdlan learning to speak with the Vikings so quickly, simply by listening to them during their travels together, constitutes some kind of magic. For my part, I think the movie simply doesn’t make it clear enough that an enormous amount of time passes during this journey. Time enough for the Arab to pick up the basics of their language.

There’s sorcery by the “old woman” who rolls the bones and chooses Fahdlan to accompany the Viking squad on their mission, and there’s sorcery by “the Wendol’s mother” down in her cave. But this is all fairly light stuff. What this movie really is, at its heart, is a buddy-cop team-up quest. Fahdlan, a fish out of water (or rather, out of desert), finds himself having to accept the ways of a civilization he initially looks down on, and learn fighting skills from them, in order to survive and succeed against a truly terrifying enemy.

And we do get some fantastic battles between Vikings and cannibals! I mean, it’s not Pirates vs Ninjas, but still…!

High Point

After fighting off the Wendol hordes the first time, Builwyf chooses to take the fight to them. He leads his band of warriors down into the cave network where they lurk. There we get a great set of underground battle scenes to rival those in the Mines of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring, with climbing, running, swinging over chasms, jumping and swimming – all while being pursued by an army of cannibalistic half-men! Hell yes!

Low Point

The very beginning and the final act are both uneven, resulting from rewrites and reshoots by Crichton. It’s easy to see that a great deal of the opening, including much of Omar Sharif’s time in the film, was cut. Similarly, the final battle in the village feels tacked on in a way, as if we needed to see one more heroic stand by the team, and check off the box for one more victory by Buliwyf, to properly put a bow on things.

The original McTiernan cut of this movie might well be weaker than the version we got. But I’d still like to compare them, to find out for myself who was right – if only the McTiernan cut would ever be released. That “interesting” Revell score, however, is available for listening on YouTube.

Standout Performance

Dennis Storhoi plays the Viking translator, Herger (or “Joyous”), who befriends Banderas’s character first. His performance is indeed joyous. He brings energy, warmth and light to the film, reacting to every situation, no matter how dire, with an upbeat sense of optimistic fatalism – if that can be called a thing. In other words, his attitude from start to finish is, We’re probably all going to die on this crazy mission, but let’s have fun in the meantime!

His attitude is summed up when he admonishes a terrified Fahdlan, “Go and hide in a hole if you wish, but you won’t live one instant longer. Your fate is fixed. Fear profits a man nothing.”

Later, a Viking tosses the Arab a huge sword, and Fahdlan complains that he can’t even lift it. Herger’s response is instantaneous, his solution all too logical and delivered with a warm smile: “Grow stronger!”

Overall Evaluation as a Movie and as Fantasy/SF/Sword & Sorcery

The 13th Warrior might, in some ways, be a mess of a movie. But it is a glorious, delightful, and extremely fun mess! Let’s be honest: There are many worse ways to spend a couple of hours than watching Antonio Banderas and his merry band of Vikings fight the Wendol.

The Wendol?

Stop saying it!!

Van Allen Plexico is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), a Grand Master of Pulp Literature (2025 class) and a multiple-award-winning author of more than two dozen novels and anthologies, ranging from space opera to Kaiju to crime fiction to superheroes to military SF. Find his works on Amazon and at Plexico.net.

Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk have become geek icons. A Knight’s Tale, Castle, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Resident Alien, The Rookie: they’ve built successful careers over the years. Their real-life friendship, and their nerdy idol status, tracks back to Firefly.

Some day I’ll go in depth on this ill-fated cult classic. Fox aired the episodes out of order, switched nights, then canceled it with some episodes unaired. A ‘tie up some loose ends’ movie (Serenity) followed. Firefly developed a dedicated following and Fillion and the actors became popular at fan conventions around the country. Fillion’s profile skyrocketed when Castle ran for eight hit seasons on ABC. And as his mainstream popularity soared, he became one of the most recognizable figures in the geek world.

Tudyk and Fillion had worked together several years ago on Alan’s hilarious web series, Con Man (mentioned below). Three months ago, they started a podcast together, and it’s fantastic. Episodes of Once We Were Spacemen are 45 minutes to 1 hour long, and it’s two long-time buddies hanging out. They share stories from their friendship, acting careers, and geek experiences. And they are as likable and funny as you hoped. Even more so.

There have been 16 episodes so far. It’s a two-hander about half the time, with a guest about every other show. So far, they’ve brought on Jewel Staite (FF– Kaylee), Gina Torres (FF – Zoe), Mark Addy (A Knight’s Tale), Alexi Hawley (Showrunner, The Rookie), Melissa O’Neill (Lucy, The Rookie), Seth Green (Austin Powers), Sean Maher (FF – Simon), and Summer Glau (FF – River).

There is so much laughter, so many funny stories. Their guests legit love these two guys, who seem to be genuinely awesome people. Hearing Fillion ‘make’ Tudyk get a Playstation when they became friends, so Alan could play Halo with Fillion’s buddies, on a LAN, shows these are real guys. Not Hollywood twits.

The insights into acting, and steps along their career paths, is terrific. Tudyk was an ass during one audition. And later, that very nearly kept him from getting Resident Alien. Just cool stuff.

I only discovered this show last week, and I’m ten episodes in. I’ve loved every one. Time flies. I watch The Rookie, and Fillion talking about that with his boss, and then also with a co-star, was neat. And the bonds formed during Firefly bleeds out with those guests.

If you are a fan of either actor (and you should be), and/or one of their shows or movies, you’re gonna like this. It’s all podcast; no video. I Youtube it. They add special effects, and fill in missing info in post-edit.

I hope there’s some Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog content. Maybe get Neil Patrick Harris, or Felicia Day. But I can unreservedly recommend this podcast.

UPDATE – Also, Nathan Filion is, currently, going around and visiting the actors from Firefly, in little Instagram reels. He has visited Zoe, Simon, River, and Inara. All with the message “Is it happening?” “Oh, it’s happening.”

Fillion later added it’s not a convention, podcast, or cross-over. I doubt it’s a reboot of Firefly. There are new Firefly Funkos coming out (announced last Summer). But the 2014 ones are still available. It will be disappointing if that’s all this is about. But it’s fun so far. I twas told Jewel is commenting on the reels.

CON MAN

Somewhat related, I’ll talk a little about Con Man. Tudyk talks about the making of this 2015-2017 web series, which was crowd funded and cost him his agents at the time. There are 25 episodes of about 12-15 minutes each, and it’s a pure homage to sci-fi/geek fandom. There are a TON of cameos (mostly sci-fi, but Sean Astin and Lou Ferrigno have big parts, for example). It’s very much a Firefly tribute, with Tudyk and Fillion’s characters’ having starred in a short-lived cult classic called Spectrum. Season two is about a Spectrum reunion, which every Firefly fan can relate to. There’s an amusing scene where Sean Mahan (as himself) corrects Tudyk’s character: “It’s Firefly. Serenity is the movie.” And Tudyk is like “Yeah, whatever.”

Casper Van Dien keeps popping up as the bartender (in different bars), and it’s a Who’s Who of sci-fi faces. Alan’s manager, played by Mindy Sterling, is beyond insanely funny. Amy Acker, Felicia Day, Tricia Helfer – some folks are in multiple episodes.

These are short, easy to binge episodes. Tudyk is simply fantastic (he yearns to be in a Clint Eastwood Western, not this sci-fi stuff). Tudyk had a superb one-episode guest stint on Justified (no humor at all), and he references that in his character’s woes. This is a really funny show which I appreciate on multiple levels.

I’ve watched it multiple times and am still looking for cameos. I know it streams on Prime, and the Roku Channel.

OTHER PODCASTS

I’m gonna write about two other geek podcasts (one ongoing, one dead) sometime.

The Psychologists are In is my all-time favorite podcast. It’s a dream come true. Maggie Lawson (Juliet) and Timothy Omundson (Lassiter) go through my all-time favorite show – Psych – episode by episode. Plus they do some other stuff. Partners on show, they are real life best buds, and it couldn’t come through more.

The behind-the-scenes info on Psych is priceless, and they have a slew of guests on. If a Psych fan asked for a podcast about the show, this is the best they could have hoped for. I love it.

 

The Friendship Onion was Lord of the Rings nerd heaven. Billy Boyd (Pippin) and Dominic Monaghan (Merry) are also real life friends who hang out together in LA. They did a video podcast which was nerd-filled fun. As a weekly feature, they had listeners suggest a food to try. They would picks something they’d never had, and record their reactions to it.

Behind-the-scenes money issues led to the show’s cancellation. Sounds like corporate shenanigans. They did well over a hundred episodes, and they really had fun. If you like the hobbits, or LoTR, you should go back and listen to the show. There’s a LOT to hear.

Bob Byrne’s ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ made its Black Gate debut in 2018 and has returned every summer since.

His ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ column ran every Monday morning at Black Gate from March, 2014 through March, 2017. And he irregularly posts on Rex Stout’s gargantuan detective in ‘Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone.’ He is a member of the Praed Street Irregulars, and founded www.SolarPons.com (the only website dedicated to the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street’).

He organized Black Gate’s award-nominated ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series, as well as the award-winning ‘Hither Came Conan’ series. Which is now part of THE Definitive guide to Conan. He also organized 2023’s ‘Talking Tolkien.’

He has contributed stories to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories — Parts III, IV, V, VI, XXI, and XXXIII.

He has written introductions for Steeger Books, and appeared in several magazines, including Black Mask, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine, and Sherlock Magazine.

You can definitely ‘experience the Bobness’ at Jason Waltz’s ’24? in 42′ podcast.

The Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski, translated by Danusia Stok and David French (Gollancz editions)

If there is one group of people that deserve more praise in the literary community, it’s translators. Recent years have shown us just how vital they are to our bookshelves and TBR lists. Its them we have to thank for every Roadside Picnic and Eternaut that dares to tantalize English speakers the world over.

Make no mistake, theirs is a challenging, sometimes even thankless job. The difficulty of translating an entire novel into another language should not be underestimated. Finding the right expression, the correct syntax, ensuring the lyricism of a work is properly communicated are just a few of the challenges translators face. Calling it an art of its own would be no exaggeration. And as a result of that art, we as readers, have been gifted a Smaug’s hoard of titles. Think entire subgenres, fresh visions of tomorrow, and treasure troves of inspiration. Our beloved speculative genre is so much richer thanks to the riotous rogues and deadly dames translated works have introduced us to.

Here are seven translators who have had a massive impact on the SFF community over the past two decades.

Megan McDowell

Mariana Enriquez’s work translated by Megan McDowell: the novel Our Share of Night (Hogarth,
February 7, 2023), and collection A Sunny Place for Shady People (Hogarth, September 17, 2024)

Richmond, Kentucky might seem impossibly far from the summit of Latin America’s literary world. But that’s exactly where one of the past decades most prolific translators of South American literature hails from.

Megan McDowell’s translations include long-standing collaborations with writers like Mariana Enriquez and Samanta Schweblin. It’s her work with the former where she has translated some truly remarkable speculative pieces of fiction including Our Share of Night and A Sunny Place for Shady People, which won a World Fantasy Award in 2025.

David French The Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski, translated by Danusia Stok and David French (Gollancz editions)

Few franchises of the modern era have had the staying power of The Witcher. Andrzej Sapkowski’s magnum opus has captured the imagination of millions through his much-loved books and the many games based on them. If you have read Sapkowski in English chances are you’ve seen some of David French’s work.

What has turned into a massive translation effort originally began with a young Englishman that made the fateful choice to venture beyond the Iron Curtain. That man was none other than David French. His motivation? As explained in multiple interviews, he began teaching in Poland in 1988 to learn Polish so that he could speak to his paternal aunt Marline in her native tongue.

Years of mastering the Polish language led to opportunities to work as a translator. When Witcher author Sapkowski began looking for a new translator in 2011, French leaped at the chance. He hasn’t looked back since.

To date, French has translated all but two of Sapkowski’s Witcher novels (The Last Wish and Blood of Elves being translated by the wonderful Danusia Stok) as well as the highly underrated Hussite trilogy. It is no exaggeration to say that millions of readers would not know Geralt, Sapkowski’s black humor, or the grim worlds his characters inhabit without the hard work of one man that just wanted to get closer to a loved one.

Lucia Graves The Cemetery of Forgotten Books by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, all translated by Lucia Graves: The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel’s Game, Labyrinth of Spirits, and The Prisoner of Heaven, plus the short story “Rose of Fire.”

To understand just what makes Lucia Graves such an important translator, you first have to appreciate just how influential the late Carlos Ruiz Zafon was. Despite dying in 2020 at the age of 55, every one of the four books published during his lifetime were celebrated like special events. And every single one was translated into English by Graves.

Graves grew up in Mallorca, Spain, the daughter of legendary British author Robert Graves. According to a 1999 interview with The Independent, the younger Graves was brought up speaking English, Spanish, and Catalan. She would initially make a name for herself translating her father’s books into Spanish. While she has written many books herself, including A Woman Unknown, it is as a translator for Zafon that she is most principally known.

In 2012 she was nominated for a Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation award for her work on Midnight Palace. Since then, she also translated most of the stories in Zafon’s posthumously published book The City of Mist.

Elisabeth Jaquette

Works by Basma Abdel Aziz translated by Elisabeth Jaquette: The Queue
(Melville House, May 24, 2016, cover by Archie Ferguson), and 8 Minutes

The diversity of Elisabeth Jaquette’s oeuvre is impressive. Her Arabic to English translations span multiple genres from sci-fi to nonfiction to political thrillers. Many of her translations offer a window into the post-Arab Spring Middle East. Geographically, they have helped expose readers to authors from North Africa to Yemen.

In 2016, her translation of Basma Abdel Aziz’s dystopian novel The Queue received the English PEN Translates award. Another translation of an Abdel Aziz story was featured in The Apex Book of World Sci-Fi Vol.5. Other speculative works Jaquette has translated include the graphic comic 8 Minutes by Mohamed Salah.

Giuseppe di Martino

Japanese-English translations by Giuseppe di Martino: Hiroyuki Morioka’s
Crest of the Stars Volumes 1-3 Collector’s Edition (JNC, March 3, 2020), and
Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki’s Billy Bat, Volume 2 (Kana, September 1, 2026)

The number of great Japanese-English translators of fiction is so vast, we could spend hours talking about the individuals feeding the world’s hunger for light-novels, short stories, and manga. You have folks like Yuki Tejima (translator of Mizuki Tsujimura’s Lost Souls series), Ajani Oloye (The Deer King by Nahoko Uehashi), Alexander O. Smith (All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka) and so many others.

But in terms of speculative novels, Giuseppe di Martino is definitely among the best. He’s translated several of Hiroyuki Morioka’s space operas, such as Crest of the Stars, as well as numerous light-novels. For the more manga-inclined, di Martino is the translator of one of the year’s most hotly anticipated titles, namely volumes two and three of Naoki Urasawa’s Billy Bat.

Anton Hur

Translations by Anton Hur: Park Seolyeon’s A Magical Girl Retires (HarperVia, April 30,
2024), and Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City (Grove Press, November 16, 2021)

South Korea has long been a heavyweight in the world of literature and when it comes to the speculative genre, Anton Hur has had a hand in translating some of the nation’s best into English. The Stockholm-born author’s CV reads almost like a ‘Who’s Who’ of South Korea’s most acclaimed works including major prize darlings like Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, Park Seolyeon’s A Magical Girl Retires, and Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City.

This year we’ll have a chance to read perhaps his most ambitious translation yet when The Bird That Drinks Tears is released on June 2. As the first of four books in one of Korea’s wildly popular The Heart of the Nhaga series, don’t be surprised if the novel and Hur enjoy Witcher-levels of success.

Ken Liu Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, translated by Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen: The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Death’s End, and The Redemption of Time (Head of Zeus Press UK editions, 2015-2017)

The author of The Grace of Kings wears many hats. His work to bring greater attention to contemporary Chinese sci-fi has been tremendous, include editing the massive anthologies Broken Stars and Invisible Planets. But most importantly for this list are the large number of translations he has done.

Fiction translated by Liu has appeared in Clarkesworld, The Best Science Fiction of the Year series, SQ Mag, Lightspeed, and Galaxy’s Edge. Some of the finest science fiction authors in China have trusted them with their work, a longlist that includes Chen Qiufan, Xia Jia, and Bao Shu.

It is as the translator of Cixin Liu’s work, however, that Ken Liu is best known. He translated the first, third, and fourth books in the best-selling Three-Body Problem series. Other efforts to bring Cixin Liu’s work to English-speaking audiences include translations of short stories such as The Weight of Memories.

What’s your favorite translated sci-fi work? Let us know in the comments below!

Ismail D. Soldan’s last article for Black Gate was Sci-Fi Dystopias We Should Learn From. He is an author, journalist, and poet. His work has previously appeared in Illustrated Worlds, LatineLit, and The Acentos Review among other publications. A proud explorer of both real and imagined worlds, some of his latest published work include The Right Kind of Royalty (on swordsandsorcerymagazine.com) and Heavenfall (in JR Handley Presents: Contested Landing Volume 2). 

Tom’s Crossing (Pantheon, October 28, 2025)

Every now and then I reach for a copy of Anna Karenina on my TBR bookshelf, but hesitate to wonder, “Do I really have time to get into this kind of heavy reading of some 800 plus pages right now?” So far, the answer has been, “No.” I really do intend to get to it at some point because, well, it’s Anna Karenina. Just not quite now.

Why then, did I pick up the 1,227 page opus by Mark Z. Danielewski, Tom’s Crossing?

Mainly because of the one and only blurb on the book jacket:

This is an amazing work of fiction. I absolutely loved it. At the heart you’ll find a blood drenched story of pursuit and two brave and resourceful children. But there’s so much more. I immersed myself in. Have never ready anything like it.

So, despite what we know about glad-handing you-blurb-my-book and I’ll blurb yours endorsements, this is the only blurb on a book by an author with a low profile and cult status, and the if it’s genuinely that great a read for Stephen King, it’s certainly good enough for me. (And, besides, I was going on a long trip where it made as much sense to take one big book rather than several. Sorry Tolstoy.)

So who is Tom and what is he crossing?

Tom is a Gatestone, a family that has a generational McCoy-Hatfield feud with the Porches. The story takes place in 1982  in Orvop (an anagram for Provo), Utah and neighboring Orem (i.e., Rome) amidst the mountains of Mt. Katanogos (Timpanagos) in the Isatch (Wasatch).  Why the need for a slightly alternative universe? Possibly to convey a heightened sense of the mythological. Add to this a mild dissection of the Church of Latter-Day Saints and some Native American folklore, but, most essentially, references to Homer’s Odyssey. For, indeed, this is a hero’s trails and tribulations quest in the classic  Joseph Campbell sense.

The crossing refers both to a treacherous mountain expedition to fulfill an oath as well as the transition from life to death — indeed, the eponymous Tom dies by page 37:

Tom always said he was gonna die young. The way he described it, with a glee his mother abhorred, he’d be hung up on some mighty bull, hand caught in the ropes tied by his own division, swung this way, that way, until he was broken, scraped off, gored, ground down, and finally stamped into an icy black dream, and in front of thousands too, maybe even on television, Gone like that and not even twenty-seven.

Gored by cancer rather than a bull, Tom is not entirely gone. Only his physical presence. Tom becomes a spiritual guide from the grave, albeit not all-seeing, a ghost to escort travelers to  safety, even while sometimes unsure of how to get there. (So while not strictly speaking a fantasy, the ghostly presence and narrative foreboding of horrors to come — “Hard to figure how so much awful horror could have started out” is the opening line — I think qualifies it as Black Gate adjacent. Plus if Stephen King likes it, Black Gate readers should.)

On his deathbed, Tom extracts a promise from his friend Kalin March, like Tom a natural equestrian, to rescue a pair of horses set for slaughter and take them across the mountains  to the safety of “the Crossin.”  (The omniscient narrator, possesses a sophisticated command of English mixed with hick slang and spellings, such as dropping the “g” in “ing” ending words; somewhere toward the last 100 pages or so you’ll begin to guess who the narrator is, though how the narrator knows as much about events to which they are not present only becomes evident at the end. Note that the title page identifies the “author” as E.L.M. and to an anonymous transcription.) This request reflects how Tom had earlier rescued Kalin from a bullying attack, and that “aside from Tom, no one else welcomed him into their fold.”

Kalin is the true outsider, neither Gaestone nor Porch, the archetypical, if even a teenaged one, Western hero (the novel’s subtitle is “A Western”). Kalin is also the naive protagonist in the tradition of Huckleberry Finn, eager to do the right thing despite societal pressures to do otherwise. Indeed, Tom’s indefatigable good humor is somewhat reminiscent of the mischievous Tom Sawyer.

Tom is Kalin’s literal spiritual guide from the grave, though not all-seeing, a ghost that helps escort Katlin and the horses across the mountains to “the Crossin,” even while sometimes unsure of how to get there. (So while not strictly speaking a fantasy, the ghostly presence and narrative foreboding of horrors to come — “Hard to figure how so much awful horror could have started out” is the opening line — I think qualifies it as Black Gate adjacent.)

Navigating steep mountainous terrain during winter is a challenging enough pursuit, but further complicating matters for Katlin is the unwanted addition to the treacherous journey of Tom’s sister, Landry, who serves simultaneously as sidekick, cheerleader, adolescent crush, and, ultimately, redeemer.  A rescue mission of another kind is also underway by the respective mothers of the two adolescents, who bond despite their different religious views and that Katlin is (falsely) accused of a murder and the kidnapping of Landry.

It wouldn’t be a Western without the bad guys, of which there are more than a few. The patriarch Old Porch, whose set-to-be-butchered ponies Kalin has “stolen” (it can’t get any more of a Western story than a horse rustling), in a fit of rage commits a murder he attempts to blames on Kalin. Old Porch and his for the most part equally no-good sons set out to follow Katlin, Landry and the horses ostensibly to gain vengeance and return of their property, though actually to cover up their father’s crime.

Further adding to the tales’ fabulism are constant references, sometimes including extensive description of their often unpleasant demises, to various local folks who’ve painted or sketched depictions of key events during these escapades. For example:

Both Marsha Taylor, a baker, and Lou Keele, a florist, would in 1985 admirably render this moment on thick sheets of cotton paper, watercolors for Marsha, colored pencil for Lou…

These works of arts at some point go on display, are destroyed in a fire, and somehow resurrected as part of a memorial art show. There are also re-enactment ceremonies of the Crossing events among the “many commentators”:

Not entirely on their own in the creative retellins, rants, iterative speculations, and musins regardin the events that transpired in and around the Isatch Canyon and Katanogos massif that late October in 1982.

These “musins”serve as a sort of Greek chorus, lamenting how fate dictates bad outcomes that could have been avoided, if only if:

Kay Shroeppel would many years hence, and in an empty theater in Helsinki, in 2028 in fact, declare to her friend Gaylene Zobell, who was just then visitin from Belgrade, Serbia… that if only Old Porch had embraced his thespian inclinations, he might’ve lived a more fulfillin life.

And because this is a Western, there is a stolen gun of seeming worth. And in keeping with Chekov, since there is a gun, it eventually goes off.

How the narrator somehow knows all these things and the way they are conveyed may prove annoying to some readers. And given that this is the proverbial doorstep of a book, these readers might be inclined to abandon the journey.

That would be their loss. Like another not always easy-to-read novel, Moby Dick, the hunt must be seen to its conclusion. As any worthy journey must.

David Soyka is one of the founding bloggers at Black Gate. He’s written over 200 articles for us since 2008. See them all here.

S.P. Meek

Sterner St. Paul Meek was born in Chicago, Illinois on April 8, 1894. He earned as associate of science degree from the University of Chicago in 1914 and continued his education at the University of Alabama, becoming a member of Phi Beta Kappa and earned a bachelor of science in metallurgical engineering. In 1916, he transferred to the University of Wisconsin, but joined the army in 1917. Although he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1921 and 1923, he remained in the army for his entire career.

While attending college, he also served as a football coach at Kirkley Junior College in Texas, as a chemist for the Western Electric Company, and at Deuvitt Laboratories, all of which went by the wayside when he joined the military. Originally stationed in the Philippines, he would go on the direct small arms ammunition research from 1923 to 1926, serve as the chief publications officer for the Ordnance Department from 1941-1944. He retired from the military in 1947 due to disability. He holds patents for tracer ammunition.

Meek married Edna Burnadge Nobel in 1927 and the couple had one son.

September 1928 Field and Stream

Meek’s first story, “Taming Poachers” to Field and Stream of all places, and it appeared in the September 1928 issue. His first story of genre interest, “The Murgatroyd Experiment,” was published in the Winter 1929 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly and dealt with the issue of overpopulation in the year 2060. Given that Meek often used his rank as part of his byline, it isn’t surprising that he also wrote about the future of warfare, with “The Red Peril” and “The Last War” exploring germ warfare between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Many of his stories published between 1930 and 1932focused on Doctor Bird and the Bureau of Standards. Although Meek wrote fifteen stories in the series, only eleven were included in the 2010 collection The Astounding Adventures of Dr. Bird.

Meek wrote mostly at short length, although two of his works, were serialized novels. The Drums of Tapajos appeared in Amazing Stories between November 1930 and January 1931, and its sequel, Troyana, was published in Amazing Stories from February through April 1932. These novels were a lost race series set in Brazil.

During his lifetime, there was only one collection of Meek’s stories, The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga, which included fourteen of his humorous stories and was published in 1934. Two other stories were published in Arctic Bride in 1944, which only ran to 36 pages.

In addition to his science fiction, Meek published a series of animal books for children, beginning with Jerry: The Adventures of an Army Dog. He published about twenty books along those lines by 1956, including Midnight: A Cow Pony, Surfman: Adventures of a Coast Guard Dog, and Pierre of the Big Top: The Story of a Circus Poodle. He also published the nonfiction So, You’re Going to Get a Puppy in 1947.

Readers could follow Meek’s advancement through the army.  From 1929 through the start of World War II, his byline indicated he was Captain S.P. Meek. After the war his byline changes to indicate he had obtained the rank of Major, and by the 1960s, he was Colonel S.P. Meek.

According to Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger, writing in 1933, some of Meek’s stories were revised and polished by Laurence D’Orsay, a professional literary critic, who died in 1947. D’Orsay also ran a literary agency and in the mid-1930s, he employed Henry Kuttner. A writing course D’Orsay ran helped spur Leigh Brackett’s writing career. In Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics, Samuel R. Delany used Meek’s writing as an example of writers who were “unbelievably bad,”  comparing him to other authors like Stanley G. Weinbaum who was “extraordinarily fine” and Edward E. Smith who “while bad, still had something going.”

Meek died on June 10, 1972 in Palm Beach, Florida.

Steven H Silver is a twenty-one-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference numerous times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.