Feed aggregator

1. Branch Affinities
2. Essentia Capacity
3. The Board
4. Sigi Recycling

…to get my upcoming class, “Craft in the 21st Century,” for the early bird price. Right now, it’s $200. After it goes live tomorrow, it’ll be $250. Hurry on over  if you want to refresh your writing for the 2020s. Click here to get more information and order the class.

We’re also offering some coaching on publishing your work.

We’ve been conducting a writer’s block course, and in the webinar, we learned that one thing which actually blocks writers in 2025 is the learning curve for indie publishing. People get stuck at various different places, so we can’t just do a simple do-this, do-that course anymore. (It was possible ten years ago; isn’t possible now)

So Dean wants to help as many folks as he can. But he can only do it one at a time. Therefore, for 3 months, he’ll help a few people get started from wherever they’re stalled. Then, if that works, he’ll do it again for a different group.

If you’re interested, check out this post: https://deanwesleysmith.com/coaching-getting-your-stuff-out/

January-February 2025 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact and Asimov’s Science
Fiction. Cover art by Tomislav Tikulin (for “Our Lady of the Gyre”) and Shutterstock

Still no sign of the next issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which is disheartening. That leaves us with only two issues published last year (Winter 2024 and Summer 2024), and no hint when the next one might arrive. I’m hearing rumors that the magazine has been sold, but I’ve been unable to confirm that, so for now it’s just gossip.

But we’ve got issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction & Fact in hand, and they’re just as enticing as usual, with contributions from John Shirley, Sean McMullen, Mark W. Teidemann, Steve Rasnic Tem, Paul Di Filippo, Sakinah Hofler, James Van Pelt, James Patrick Kelly, Siobhan Carroll, Robert Reed, Faith Merino, Matthew Kressel, Rick Wilber, Jane Yolen, Kendall Evans, and many more.

The issues contain a new Great Ship tale by Robert Reed, a new Unsettled Worlds story by Siobhan Carroll (which Sam Tomaino calls a “suspenseful, exciting tale”), a new novelette “Rejuve Blues” from John Shirley (which Victoria Silverwolf labels “a suspenseful crime story and psychological study”), and the last installment in James Patrick Kelly’s trio of stories about Marishka Volochkova, “Moon and Mars,” which Sam proclaims is “probably another Nebula nominee.”

Victoria Silverwolf at Tangent Online enjoyed in the latest Analog.

“Our Lady of the Gyre” by Doug Franklin mostly takes place aboard a sea vessel that fights excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere via bioengineered diatoms. The protagonist, who communicates with an artificial intelligence orbiting the Earth, takes two young people on his ship and faces a dangerous storm… a very dense work of fiction that requires careful reading. At first, it is difficult to tell what’s happening or what this future world is like, but patient readers will be rewarded with a vivid and imaginative tale with appealing characters.

The novelette “Rejuve Blues” by John Shirley features an elderly couple who win a lottery that offers them the chance to be young again. The man runs into trouble with criminals, while the woman, thinking he has left her, returns to her former activity as a fighter against the Taliban. The author creates a complex and convincing future that is neither utopian nor dystopian… a suspenseful crime story and psychological study.

The main character in “Go Your Own Way” by Chris Barnham accidentally discovers a way to travel into alternate versions of London, some very similar to the familiar one and others wildly different. He falls in love in one of these parallel worlds, but the arrival of an alternate version of himself causes complications. The plot is that of the eternal triangle, in which two of the people involved are the same person. (One might call it an isosceles triangle.) The various parallel Londons are described only briefly, and are far more interesting than the love story…

In the novelette “Prince of Spirals” by Sean McMullen, conspirators kidnap a forensic anthropologist and force him to study samples from the skeletons of two bodies thought to be the so-called Princes in the Tower, heirs to King Edward IV of England… The motive is to determine if either Prince survived to have descendants, giving members of the conspiracy a claim to the throne… This is a suspenseful crime story, with intriguing speculative technology and an interesting look at the techniques used by forensic anthropologists.

At first, “Quest of the Sette Comuni” by Paul Di Filippo seems like pure fantasy, as a female satyr and a golem set out to rescue a princess from a wizard, in order to free their master from his imprisonment by a sea-dwelling queen. It soon becomes clear that the golem is actually a machine and the other characters are the result of advanced biotechnology. The setting is richly imagined, from an underwater Venice inhabited by amphibious humans to an antagonist who has made himself resemble the Jabberwock from Lewis Carroll’s famous nonsense poem. Although not a comedy, the story has sufficient amount of subtle wit to draw the reader into its colorful world.

The magazine concludes with the novella “Apartment Wars” by Vera Brook. The setting is Poland in 1979. The widow of a scientist faces the possibility that she will be forced out of her relatively large apartment by the government because she lives alone. She expects her daughter and son-in-law to arrive soon as permanent guests, justifying her need for the place, but time is running out. Meanwhile, the abusive boyfriend of a neighbor threatens to expose her situation to the authorities… The situation takes a dramatic turn when the widow discovers an extraordinary device built by her husband.

Read Victoria’s complete review here.

The new Asimov’s is thoughtfully reviewed by Mina at Tangent Online. Here’s a sample.

“In the Splinterlands the Crows Fly Blind” by Siobhan Carroll takes patience to read. The world building is complex and initially confusing. The protagonist, Charlie, sets off to find his missing brother, Gabe, as well as Gabe’s girlfriend. There are some groovy invented words like Universe-shard, atmotech, Crowmind, Crowdogs and Vestigium — along with words from what seems to be a Cree dialect — they do eventually all make sense. Charlie finds himself a hero as he saves his fragment of world from destruction by the carelessness of “some rich guy stepping on butterflies.” Worth persisting.

“Five Hundred KPH Toward Heaven” by Matthew Kressel is set just after the heyday of lifts into space, reminiscent of train travel. They are being replaced by much faster, cheaper ships. In a final ascent party, Terese reminisces with other lift pilots and ponders on what is being lost — a sense of wonder and a sense of connection — “sometimes there’s benefits to going slow.”

“Shadow of Shadows” by Frank Ward is a pleasure to read because, once you reach the end, the title hits you with its full poignancy. This reader appreciates when an author does this so well. A washed-up research physicist stands at the threshold of finally finding proof for his theory of a “Many Worlds Interpretation.” The proof of alternate universes is, however, not without pain. A tale that explores not just quantum theory but also its emotional repercussions. I would read this twice.

The tension build-up in “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” by Beston Barnett is incredible. One can only say: bravo! In this story, a desperate scientist, being interrogated and tortured by an AI courageously sets out to trick it into shutting down. The references to Linux, Hexspeak and ASCII are very satisfying for this linguist, for AI does indeed have its own language.

“My Biggest Fan” by Faith Merino is a creepy and ultimately sad tale. The narrator grows up seeing the same woman and hearing the same tune at regular intervals; but she is always a different age. She leaves him notes signed “your biggest fan.” When he finally understands why their trajectories keep overlapping, it’s tool late: they have become each other’s hell, as Sartre would say. Quantum particles meet stalker meet Greek tragedy.

In “Moon and Mars” by James Patrick Kelly, Moon-settler Mariska is part of the crew on the Natividad, a colonists’ ship she has joined to be with her Martian boyfriend, Elan. It soon becomes apparent that those with vested interests in the anti-matter that will power the ship through a wormhole to the Destination planet on the other side are trying to stop the mission. Mariska, her mother and Elan are all part of a group determined to take off early before the mission can be stopped. The race against time is gripping…. A great read.

Read Mina’s full review here.

Here’s all the details on the latest SF print mags.

[Click the images for bigger versions.]

Contents of the January-February 2025 issue of Analog Science Fiction

Analog Science Fiction & Science Fact

Editor Trevor Quachri gives us a tantalizing summary of the current issue online, as usual. Sadly, I didn’t think to grab a copy before the latest issues dropped. Next time.

Here’s the full TOC.

Novella

“Apartment Wars” by Vera Brook

Novelettes

“Strange Events at Fletcher and Front!” by Tom R. Pike
“Rejuve Blues” by John Shirley
“Prince of Spirals” by Sean McMullen
“Gut Check” by Robert E. Hampson

Short Stories

“Our Lady of the Gyre” by Doug Franklin
“Second Chance” by Sakinah Hofler
“Upgrade” by Mark W. Teidemann
“Fixative” by Jonathan Olfert
“The Only God is Us” by Sarah Day
“As Ordinary Things Often Do” by Kelly Lagor
“Go Your Own Way” by Chris Barnham
“Flight 454” by Virgo Kevonté
“Battle Buddy” by Stephen Raab
“Prime Purpose” by Steve Rasnic Tem
“Quest of the Sette Comuni” by Paul Di Filippo

Flash Fiction

“Notes From Your Descendants” by Lorraine Alden
“Vigil” by James Van Pelt
“The Spill” by M.T. Reiten

Science Fact

Saving the Skies: How One Small City in Arizona is Pointing the Way to a Better (Darker) Way, by Richard A. Lovett

Poetry

Beyond the Standard Model by Ursula Whitcher
‘Oumuamua by Geoffrey A. Landis

Reader’s Departments

Guest Editorial: Information is Power by John J. Vester
Biolog: Tom R. Pike by Richard A. Lovett
Unknowns, edited by Alec Nevala-Lee:
Hidden Figures by Scott Kim
Robotic Shifting Procedure by Patrick Berry
The Alternate View by John G. Cramer
In Times to Come
The Reference Library by Sean C.W. Korsgaard
Brass Tacks
2024 Index
Upcoming Events by Anthony Lewis

Contents of the January-February 2025 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Asimov’s Science Fiction

Sheila Williams provides a handy summary of the latest issue of Asimov’s at the website. But I missed it this month. Next time I’ll remember before it’s gone.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

Novella

“Moon and Mars” by James Patrick Kelly

Novelettes

“In the Splinterlands, the Crows Fly Blind” by Siobhan Carroll
“Shadow of Shadows” by Frank Ward
“A Girl from Hong Kong” by Robert Reed
“My Biggest Fan” by Faith Merino

Short Stories

“Five Hundred KPH Toward Heaven” by Matthew Kressel
“What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” by Beston Barnett
“Through the Pinhole, Or, the Origin of a Holostory” by Nikki Braziel
“Jilly in Right: A Thought Experiment” by Rick Wilber
“Completely Normal” by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister

Poetry

Your Clone Can Always Look Herselves Up by Robert Frazier
Einstein to Newton by Gary Sterling
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer by Kenton K. Yee
Fantastic! by Jane Yolen
Too Far Away by Jenny Blackford
Unfolding Origami by Kendall Evans

Departments

Editorial: An Evening in SoHo by Sheila Williams
Reflections: Uintatherium, I Dream of Thee by Robert Silverberg
On the Net: The Zoo Hypothesis by James Patrick Kelly
Thought Experiment: The Impossible Spectacle of 2001: A Space Odyssey by Kelly Lagor
On Books by Peter Heck
Asimov’s Readers’ Award Ballot
2024 Index
Next Issue

Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction are available wherever magazines are sold, and at various online outlets. Buy single issues and subscriptions at the links below.

Asimov’s Science Fiction (208 pages, $8.99 per issue, one year sub $47.97 in the US) — edited by Sheila Williams
Analog Science Fiction and Fact (208 pages, $8.99 per issue, one year sub $47.97 in the US) — edited by Trevor Quachri
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (256 pages, $10.99 per issue, one year sub $65.94  in the US) — edited by Sheree Renée Thomas

The January-February issues of Asimov’s and Analog were on sale until February 11. See our coverage of the November-December issues here, and all our recent magazine coverage here.

Truly looking forward to the third book. In the meantime, the three below are my favored topics of coverage.

1.) Branch Affinities
2.) Sigl Recycling
3.) The Board

While there are others I want to include mentioned by others in the comments, I feel those may be plot points meant to be explored as the books reveal them.

Sigl fashion
Attunement
Essentia Capacity

Sigle Recycling
Attunement
Sigle Fashion

I am most interested first in closing out knowledge of essentia and sigils.

After that, the structure of the drucrafting world more broadly.

So my order would be:

1 – Essentia Capacity
2 – Attunement
3 – Branch Affinities
4 – Sigl Recycling
5 – Country Affinities
6 – The Board
7 – Corporations

Black Water: Abyss (Altitude Film Entertainment, July 10, 2020)

My next watch-a-thon is a favorite genre: crocs and gators. Unfortunately, this means the pickings are a bit slim, as I’ve already seen most of them, but I’ve managed to dig up 15 so far (supplemented with a Gila Monster and a couple of Komodos), and I’m sure the intended list of 20 will materialize as streaming services start suggesting titles.

What a Croc #14: Black Water: Abyss (2020) Crackle

Croc or gator? Crocodile!

Real or faker? Some pretty great CG.

Any good? I do like me an Aussie croc flick, and this is one of them. The premise is simple: stick some folks in a cave, flood it, trap them, let loose a big croc. The spaces are tight, the tension is taut, and the croc has the good sense to eat the cast in order of character development.*

There’s a bit of relationship drama in the mix between meals, but at the end of the day it’s just a murky cocktail of Rogue and The Decent, but doesn’t come close to being as good as either. Still, I didn’t hate it, and it was well produced, so I’ll grade it a little higher.

7/10

*Now where have I seen that poster design before…?

Lake Placid: The Final Chapter (Syfy, September 29, 2012) and Rollergator (RiffTrax, 1996)

What a Croc #15: Lake Placid: The Final Chapter (2012) YouTube

Croc or gator? Alligator(s)!

Real or faker? All terrible CG.

Any good? I still have fond memories of the first time I watched Lake Placid — I was totally unprepared for the all round brilliance of it, from the writing and the cast to the effects and direction. Sadly, each successive sequel has been horrendous, and this one, the incorrectly named ‘Final Chapter’ is the penultimate nail in the coffin.*

As you can tell from the ‘quality’ poster, the story is trite, the characters uninteresting and the effects garbage — the only redeeming features might be Robert England (hamming it up in another gator flick), and Yancy Butler (wasted here as she reprises her role as a two-pack-a-day-voiced rogue ranger). The most egregious aspect of this one though, is the directing and editing. There’s only one director who can get away with that many crash zooms, and his name is Sam Raimi.

Raimi did not direct this.

4/10

*I just discovered there are actually TWO more Lake Placid films after this one. Not that it makes this any easier.

What a Croc #16: Rollergator (1996) Tubi

Croc or gator? Gator. Small. Purple.

Real or faker? A hand puppet.

Any good? I tried to find the original version of this, but had to settle for the Rifftrax version. Shocking admission: I don’t find Rifftrax particularly funny (not a huge fan of MST3K either) and they just paved the way for stuff like CinemaSins and every other armchair critic who thinks they’re funny. I am fully aware of the staggering hypocrisy of this statement, but there you go.

Anyway, in this film a roller skating woman meets a small, jive talking gator and tries to get him out of the carnival and back to the swamp. Presumably written by a third-grader, it’s utter crap. Not even funny or surreal enough to be a guilty pleasure — just a miserable, miserable slog.

1/10

Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus (The Asylum, December 21, 2010) What a Croc #17: Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus (2010) YouTube

Croc or gator? Croc. Osaurus.

Real or faker? Rubbish CG.

Any good? You know what the answer is going to be, so let’s just cut to the chase. Robert Picardo is a fine actor, he voiced the male, culturally-obsessed alien in Joe Dante’s Explorers and I love him for that. He’s also good in everything else, but I guess he needed a new deck, because he’s in this.

Gary Stretch is also in this. British boxing fans may remember the name, the rest of you will just know him as a punching bag-faced enigma with the looks of a leading man and the mystery of a Swiffer. Sarah Lieving stars opposite him as a potentially badass special investigator who is relegated to scowling boobily at the rest of the cast while flying a pretend helicopter.

The story is rote, the direction and editing are dull and the effects are tragic. The titular creatures (especially the giant croc) are rendered in spectacular blur-o-vision, unhindered by weight or physics. I feel neither joy nor despair at having watched this film, I’m just languishing in a limbo populated by cookie cutters, tight vests and pixels.

4/10

Croczilla (Beijing Enlight Pictures, 2012) and Crocodile (Lions Gate, August 26, 2000)

What a Croc #18: Croczilla (AKA Million Dollar Crocodile) (2012) YouTube

Croc or gator? Crocodile. Big boi.

Real or faker? Fairly decent CG (in parts).

Any good? I started watching this one quite early on in the watch-a-thon, and thought it had promise, so saved it to end on a high note. It is indeed fun, however, I would sorely love to see a subtitled version, as the English dubbing on this Chinese movie is horrendous.

Promoted as China’s ‘first monster movie’, a claim that has been made on several of the films I’ve watched from China, Croczilla is meant to be a tongue-in-cheek flick. For this reason, the actors ham it up to the level of cartoon characters, and the English V.O. artists were apparently told to do the same, because the dubbing is ear-splittingly intolerable, especially the voice of Barbie Hsu’s character, which threatened to shatter every window in the house.

Aside from the audio hell, it’s a jolly romp, with a 36 ft croc on the rampage in Hangzhou, its belly full of Yuan (about a million worth, or 100,000 Euros as the shrill dubbing informs us). The cast is likeable (although the gangsters are a trifle over the top), and the croc itself is a nice bit of CG. It’s a great model, and for the most part animated well, but some of the interactions with its environment weren’t great. Overall, I enjoyed it, and that’s what matters, so there.

7/10

What a Croc #19: Crocodile (2000) Crackle

Croc or gator? Crocodile.

Real or faker? Some OK animatronics and rubbish CG.

Any good? Apparently, when I said Eaten Alive was the only Tobe Hooper film I hadn’t seen, I had forgotten about this one — and I wish it had remained forgotten. I was initially excited when I saw Hooper’s name, doubly so when I saw the effects were done by Nicotero and Berger, but it seems there was no budget for effects and Hooper couldn’t give two shits about the film.

Nobody brings anything fresh to the production, it’s the same tired old story of unlikeable frat kids getting drunk and horny in a swamp, and the only reason to watch is to see how they get dispatched. Unfortunately, save for a couple of fun shots of folks sliding down a gullet, it’s all a bit ham-fisted, and the CG croc suffers from the same weightlessness as all the other low-budget beasts of the era. A shame.

5/10

Crocodile 2: Death Swamp (Nu Image Films, August 1, 2002) What a Croc #20: Crocodile 2: Death Swamp (2002) Crackle

Croc or gator? Crocodile. Again.

Real or faker? Some pretty great animatronics.

Any good? Hot on the heels of the disappointment of Crocodile comes Crocodile 2, which chose to ignore sequel conventions and be titled Crocodiles. Also surprisingly, it is that rare breed, the superior sequel, and I had a lot of fun with it.

No hackneyed ‘hot kids in a swamp’ plot, this one is full of bank robberies, plane crashes and helicopter hijinks. The bad guys are extremely potty-mouthed and awful enough to cheer when they get eaten, and the plucky protagonists put up a fair fight. The effects are actually pretty gruesome, and the croc itself is one of the better ones I’ve seen. Good heavens, I do believe I’ve ended on a high note!

8/10

That’s the crocs and gators done. Next up, werewolves!

Previous Murkey Movie surveys from Neil Baker include:

What a Croc, Part I
What a Croc, Part II
Prehistrionics
Jumping the Shark
Alien Overlords
Biggus Footus
I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie
The Weird, Weird West
Warrior Women Watch-a-thon

Neil Baker’s last article for us was What a Croc, Part II. Neil spends his days watching dodgy movies, most of them terrible, in the hope that you might be inspired to watch them too. He is often asked why he doesn’t watch ‘proper’ films, and he honestly doesn’t have a good answer. He is an author, illustrator, outdoor educator and owner of April Moon Books (AprilMoonBooks.com).

1.Sigl Fashion
2.Sigl Recycling
3.Country Affinities
4.The Board
5.Corporations
6.Branch Affinities
7.Essentia Capacity
8.Attunement

The Board

Sigl Recycling

1. The board
2. Corporations
3. Sigl recycling
4. Country affinities
5. Sigl fashion

Westerns by Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Bandit of Hell’s Bend and The Deputy Sheriff of Commanche County (Ace Books); Apache Devil and The War Chief (Ballantine Books). Covers by Boris Vallejo, the Brothers Hildebrandt, and Frank McCarthy.

Like many pulp writers of his day, ERB dipped his toes into the western genre. He wrote four: two pretty standard ones and two that incorporate the Native American experience. He knew something of what he wrote, having worked on his brother’s ranch in Idaho at age 16, and having served with the 7th cavalry in Arizona in the late 1890s.

His first standard western was The Bandit of Hell’s Bend (1924), followed by The Deputy Sheriff of Commanche County in 1940. Both of my copies are later printings from Ace with very cool Boris illustrations. I like these better than many of Boris’s paintings because they seem less static. He does a good job of portraying action here.

In Bandit, we have a disgraced ranch foreman and a young woman who has inherited the ranch, and various villains who want to steal the ranch from her because they know there’s silver on it. The foreman, Bull, has to rise to the occasion. There’s great action and pretty good plotting, although you’ll probably figure it out pretty soon. And, as always, ERB creates sympathetic heroes and dastardly villains.

In Deputy Sheriff, a cowboy named Buck Mason is suspected of a murder he didn’t commit, and he has to run and hide until he has a chance to prove his innocence. This plot is not as good as Bandit but it gets the job done to showcase ERB’s lightning paced tale.

ERB’s other two westerns are connected and center very strongly on the Native American experience. The hero, though, is a white boy who is taken captive by Apaches and raised as Geronimo’s adopted son. He is given the Apache name of Shoz-Dijiji (Black Bear), for having killed one at a young age, and he grows up hating whites.

These books are The War Chief (1927), and Apache Devil (1933). Although there are some stereotypical elements to these books, they show that ERB had very strong sympathies for the Apache and disapproved of the way they had been treated by whites.

I found all of these books well worth reading, though the Apache books have stayed with me the longest. The cover art for The War Chief is magnificent and is by Frank McCarthy. The Apache Devil cover looks to be signed by Hildebrandt.

The Rider, The Oakdale Affair, The Mucker, and Return of the Mucker (Ace Books). Covers by Frank Frazetta.

ERB wrote a three book series generally called The Mucker. They were first published in magazines in the mid to late 1910s, but I have much later reprints, of course, from the 1970s. All of mine, shown here, are from Ace books with Frazetta covers. I particularly like the first book cover, although all are cool.

The Mucker (1914). Billy Byrne is born on the mean streets of Chicago and grows up a criminal. After being accused of murder, he flees to San Francisco and ends up shanghaied. A shipwreck leaves him and a beautiful high society girl stranded in an east Asian jungle and she needs rescuing. I really liked the development of the character here. Through love, Billy learns how to be a decent human being and becomes quite a hero.

The Return of the Mucker (1916). This book finds Billy trying to clear himself of his previous murder charges and failing. He ends up in Mexico in the midst of a revolution. And it so happens that his love interest from the first book, Barbara, is also there. The Mucker was a very fine novel but the sequel is pretty weak. Coincidences pile upon coincidences until it’s pretty hard to suspend belief. But it still has the action rolling. This one could easily be counted as one of his westerns given the setting.

The Oakdale Affair (1918). I’m not sure what ERB was striving for with this book. It’s got mystery elements, gothic elements, horror elements, western type elements. He put everything and the kitchen sink into this one. But it worked and I enjoyed it. It is only peripherally related to the Mucker stories in that it features a hobo character that appeared in The Return of the Mucker.

I included ERB’s The Rider here because of the Frazetta cover and because it was at one point published in a double with The Oakdale Affair. But it’s not part of the Mucker series. It involves a bandit called “The Rider” who exchanges places with a prince (Boris) who is about to be married to the princess of another European duchy (neither of whom want to marry the other). Chaos ensues. ERB crammed a lot of action and plot twists into this short work.

The Efficiency Expert (Charter, 1979) and The Girl From Hollywood (Ace Books, 1977). Covers by John Rush and Boris Vallejo

My favorite genres are Fantasy, SF, Westerns, Horror, and Thrillers. I don’t read a lot of straight mysteries and read relatively little “mundane” fiction. By mundane, I mean fiction set in a modern world where the happenings are portrayed as realistic. After reading ERB’s westerns and everything he wrote with fantastic elements, I was left with three books: The Girl from Hollywood, The Efficiency Expert, and The Girl From Farris’s.

They were also among the more difficult ERB books to find and were expensive, but I wanted them because they were… well, ERB. I got both Girl and Efficiency in 1970’s paperback form but couldn’t get Farris and finally ordered it in a modern paperback printed from public domain materials. Here are my capsule reviews.

The Girl from Hollywood (ACE, 1977, Boris Cover) is not quite a western. It takes place in the 1920s, but much is set in a western landscape and involves many western tropes. The plot involves a fine western family whose lives become entangled with Hollywood types. Some of these are basically good and recover from their evil natures while others never do.

As is typical of ERB’s work, there are coincidences that help the plot along, and there’s actually very little action compared to his typical story. However, the sheer narrative drive that ERB was able to bring to his tales keeps you reading. I finished it in one day, if not quite one sitting. Not my favorite work by him by far, but still enjoyable.

The Girl from Farris’s (CreateSpace edition, 2017). Cover by Frank Frazetta

The Girl from Farris’s (Public Domain, from CreateSpace, 2017). The cover is by Frank Frazetta. An editorial note names Taylor Anderson as editor, and claims the publisher is Odin’s Library Classics. The text appears to be intact but the print is small and there are no indented paragraphs. I actually read this in ebook version, though, so I’ll just stick it on my shelves. I rather like the cover but don’t know where it came from.

“Farris’s” is a house of ill repute and June Lathrop a lady of the evening who is trying to escape it. She meets a young man — Ogden Secor — who wants to help her and fate keeps throwing them together. It’s a tale of redemption, which is an element in all three of these novels. One particularly interesting point is that Ogden is a failed Chicago businessman who tries to make a new life for himself in Idaho. ERB himself fled the business world of Chicago for his brother’s Idaho ranch. They say, “write what you know.”

The Efficiency Expert (Charter, 1979, cover by John Rush) is the last Burroughs book I’ve read, and very nearly the last one to exist that I hadn’t read. I left these three to last thinking they weren’t much up my alley. None of them have any fantastic elements. Efficiency Expert is a straightforward and realistically based story of a young man of quality who is down on his luck but never succumbs to corruption and wins out in the end. I was engrossed throughout. There’s certainly plenty of coincidence featured in the plot but I didn’t mind it much and even without a lot of action happening, it had narrative drive and kept my attention.

I’d rate Efficiency the best of the three, followed by Hollywood and Farris’s.

We’ll wrap up Burroughs next time with a look at his Hollow Earth tales.

Previous installments in this series include:

The Fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Part I: Sword and Planet
The Fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Part II: Tarzan and The Land That Time Forgot

Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for Black Gate was The Fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Part II: Tarzan and The Land That Time Forgot.

1. Essentia Capacity
2. Sigl fashion

1) Sigl Recycling & Essentia Storage (Aurum)
2) [Write-In] Spiritual Entities/factions & their special ‘Gifts’
3) [Write-In] Cults (like The Winged) who align to Spirits
4) [Write-In] Creating Sigl for other species (As above)

1. Country Affinities.
2. Branch Affinities.
3. Corporations.
4. The Board.
5. Essentia Capacity.

Not sure if these would count as spoilers but if not then.
1. Spiritual Entities that grant’s Steven’s Essentia Sight and other “gifts.”
2. The big Cults from the Winged, the Order of the Dragon and the other big Cult.
3. The minor Cults such as Ogun and Perun that the gang and strike teams follows as well as other similar groups.

The Ninth Gate (Summit Entertainment, 1999)

Last week’s article on Angel Heart not only resulted in a lot of fun and insightful comments from all of you, but it got me thinking about another film that I appreciate in a similar way. It will be twenty-six years old next month and having given it a re-watch last weekend, I wondered what your thoughts would be on this one.

The Ninth Gate, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Johnny Depp, was released in March 1999. Polanski was co-writer on the screenplay which was loosely (and I do mean loosely) adapted from the book, The Club Dumas (1993) by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (HarperVia, May 1, 2006)

In the film, Dean Corso (Depp) is a New York book dealer with a reputation for unscrupulous methods. When Boris Balkan (Frank Langella), a wealthy collector of rare books on the occult, hires him to authenticate a mysterious tome called The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, Corso embarks on a journey across Europe.

The book, rumored to summon the devil when used correctly, exists in three copies, but only one is authentic. Corso’s task is to examine the three editions and uncover the truth. As Corso delves deeper into his investigation, strange deaths and supernatural occurrences begin to haunt his steps. Along the way, he is joined by a mysterious woman (Emmanuelle Seigner), whose true nature seems tied to the book’s sinister secrets.

In parallel with Angel Heart, The Ninth Gate presents a dark journey into the unknown by a skeptical protagonist who is in over his head but doesn’t know it. The memorable visuals created by Darius Khondji, who is known for his work on Se7en, are well synchronized with the puzzle elements of the story and Polanski’s signature direction is evident as well. From dusty bookstores to candlelit castles, the cinematography oozes occult suspense all over the place.

I frankly love The Ninth Gate all the way up until its final few moments.

[Minor spoilers ahead.]

The film does a fabulous slow burn to what can only be described as an enigmatic conclusion, and this is why Angel Heart is still my favorite of the two films. While we aren’t at all confused as to what will become of Harry Angel, The Ninth Gate leaves viewers in the maddening position of wondering whether Dean Corso has unlocked forbidden knowledge, become ensnared in a deadly conspiracy, or gone to literal Hell – maybe all three. I remember screaming “NO!” at the screen when the credits rolled since all the fabulous creepiness that built through the entire film, simply went off a cliff at the very end, without resolution.

Johnny Depp in The Ninth Gate

That sent me straight to the source material to see if Polanski was being a jerk by leaving us with such an unsatisfactory conclusion. I immediately went out and bought a copy of The Club Dumas assuming that it would fill in some, if not all, of the missing pieces.

Nope.

While The Ninth Gate is based on The Club Dumas, it omits substantial portions of the novel, particularly a subplot about a lost chapter of The Three Musketeers. The film focuses solely on the occult storyline, which, by the way, is a sub, SUB plot of the book. If anything, the ending of the book was even more obtuse, with themes centered on literary puzzles and human obsession rather than a definitive supernatural climax.

Interestingly, the titular tome at the center of the film, called De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis, or The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, is a fictional text. Its design plays a significant role in the plot, with eerie and violent illustrations which are gruesomely brought to life in the form of the demise of several characters. The engravings within The Nine Gates book, which were painstakingly designed for the film, serve as the visual centerpiece of the story. Each engraving contains subtle differences across the editions, forming cryptic clues for Corso and the audience to unravel. For movie prop collectors, it is a highly recognizable and sought-after addition.

Emmanuelle Seigner and Johnny Depp in The Ninth Gate

I used to have visions of owning my own copy of The Nine Gates, however, a well-made replica with a leather cover can go for upwards of $1200 or more. If you’re interested in a more attainable version, an engineer named Michael F. Haspil has created a detailed tutorial including the printable text and illustrations you’ll need to build one yourself, which you can find here.

Ultimately, The Ninth Gate received mixed reviews at the box office and made a rather crappy $58M against a $38M budget – so basically a bomb by Hollywood standards. Though critics praised its style, it was criticized for its pacing and lack of resolution. Despite that, The Ninth Gate has aged well with viewers like me who enjoy slow-burning mysteries and subtle horror. Depp delivers a restrained performance, grounding the fantastical story in a world of skepticism and pragmatism, while Frank Langella’s portrayal of Boris Balkan adds recognizable vice as a man consumed by his quest for power, at the peril of his soul.

The Ninth Gate’s blend of literary intrigue and supernatural tension makes it a film that (mostly) stands up over time. Whether you’re a fan of Polanski’s work, a lover of occult mysteries, or simply curious about the interplay between literature and cinema, The Ninth Gate is worth revisiting.

Thoughts?

Eight years ago, in the wake of the 2016 election, I penned a piece for Black Gate that I called “Reading for the End of the World”, in which I listed a dozen books I thought ideal for helping us get through the four years of turmoil and uncertainty that loomed ahead. I wrote it, posted it, and moved on with my life, little suspecting that coping with that particular cultural earthquake was not a one-time job like getting a vasectomy, but would instead turn out to be an onerous recurring chore like mowing the lawn or doing the laundry.

Well, if He did it again, I suppose I should too. Therefore, once again, “In the spirit of the incipient panic, withered expectations, and rampant paranoia that seem to dominate our current national life, I offer twelve books to get you through the next four years (however long they may actually last): a reading list for the New Normal.” (Groundhog Day is a movie, not a book; that’s why it’s not here.) In 2017 I hoped that the books I discussed would provide some much-needed insight or diversion, and that’s my hope for these twelve additional volumes. Some things have changed after the passage of eight years, however, so now I suppose I should also state that these books were neither written nor selected with the help of A.I. (Of course, that just begs the larger question — how do you know that “Thomas Parker” is a real person? Short answer: you don’t. Then again, I don’t know if any of you are real people, either.)

1. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, 1946

Generally considered the greatest American political novel (though Robert Penn Warren denied that he had any explicit political intent in writing it), All the King’s Men follows the rise and fall of Willie Stark, who begins as an idealistic backcountry lawyer and ends as the extraordinarily powerful and ruthless governor of his state. That state is Louisiana, and Willie Stark bears more than a coincidental resemblance to the real-life governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932, Huey Long, who maintained an iron grip on the state even after he left the Baton Rouge statehouse to become a United States Senator and presidential aspirant. Long’s career ended with his assassination in 1935, just as Willie Stark’s life is also cut short by an assassin’s bullet. However, the book is more than just a political roman à clef, more than an incisive portrait of an unscrupulous demagogue or a warning about the dangers such a person can pose for a democracy; fundamentally, it’s meditation on the mysterious conjunctions of character and history, and an examination of the myriad ways personal (and often petty) passions mesh in unforeseen and unpredictable ways, powering the huge, seemingly impersonal processes we all find ourselves caught up in.  All the King’s Men (which has been filmed twice, first in 1949, winning Broderick Crawford a Best Actor Oscar for his Category 5 portrayal of Willie Stark, and less successfully in 2006, this time with Sean Penn in the lead role) is a book which will always have something to say to those who want to gain some measure of understanding (if not tranquility) by taking a step back and viewing the storm from a distance.

2. Stayin’ Alive: The 1970’s and the Last Days of the Working Class by Jefferson Cowie, 2010

Stayin’ Alive (the irony of the title becomes increasingly apparent through the course of the book) sheds a bright light on our current condition by chronicling how “The social and political spaces for the collective concerns of working people — the majority of the citizenry — disappeared from American civic life when the nation moved from manufacturing to finance, from troubled hope to jaded ennui, from the compromises and constraints of industrial pluralism to the jungle of the marketplace.” The progression of the key players — labor leaders like Jimmy Hoffa and George Meany and politicians like Hubert Humphrey, Robert and Edward Kennedy, Richard Nixon, George McGovern, George Wallace, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan — illustrates the shift from a working class that defined itself by its material conditions (wages, benefits, working conditions, freedom to unionize) to one that defined itself by positions on so-called “cultural” issues (busing, abortion, “patriotism” loosely defined.) Cowie also has time to look at television, movies and music, from Bruce Springsteen’s album Born to Run, with its message that working class life can’t be transformed but only escaped, to the film Dog Day Afternoon, which says that even escape is impossible. The book’s analysis is brilliant and persuasive, and though Cowie tries to hold out some hope for the future, the picture painted is a bleak one, depicting as it does a landscape of diminished economic opportunity, truncated rights, and withered hope — pretty much the world we live in today, which is a direct result of the 70’s, a decade by the end of which “working people would possess less place and meaningful identity within civic life than at any time since the industrial revolution.”

3.Singular Travels, Campaigns and Adventures of Baron Munchausen by R.E. Raspe and Others, 1948

Think carefully before you answer — who is the greatest liar in history? You’re right, of course — it’s Baron Munchausen! In the picaresque novel by Rudolph Erich Raspe, first published in 1785, the nobleman is a nonstop raconteur, spinning stories of his adventures and exploits as a military man and world traveler. Such memoirs were fairly common in the eighteenth century, but few ex-soldiers ever (successfully!) wrestled a forty-foot crocodile, visited the moon by climbing up a beanstalk, rode a flying cannonball over enemy lines, or got swallowed by a great fish while bathing in the Mediterranean (Munchausen freed himself by dancing the hornpipe in the creature’s stomach, which caused it to thrash about and head for the surface, thus attracting the attention of a ship, which harpooned it, hauled it on board, and began cutting it up. “As soon as I perceived a glimmering of light I called out lustily to be released from a situation in which I was now almost suffocated. It is impossible for me to do justice to the degree and kind of astonishment which sat upon every countenance at hearing a human voice issue from a fish, but more so at seeing a naked man walk upright out of his body: in short, gentlemen, I told them the whole story, as I have told you, whilst amazement struck them dumb.”) The actual Baron Munchausen, who fought for Russia in various campaigns against the Turks, spent his retirement entertaining people by telling tall tales about his exploits. Raspe heard some of these yarns and put them into his book along with other outrageous lies of his own invention, which infuriated and humiliated the real Baron, who was driven into seclusion by the ridicule of all Europe. To think that sheer embarrassment could make someone retire from public life; 1785 was a long time ago, was it not? (If you want to read these wildly entertaining adventures, make sure you get an edition that has the original illustrations by Gustave Doré; they are just as funny and delightful as the Baron’s fabulations.)

4. The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad, 1972

Alternate-history stories come in many varieties, from The Man in the High Castle to Bring the Jubilee to Pavane to Harry Turtledove’s infinitely expanding oeuvre, but few of them are as audacious and original as Norman Spinrad’s foray into the genre, The Iron Dream. The inside-cover blurb lets you know what you’re in for: “Let Adolf Hitler transport you to a far-future Earth, where only FEREC JAGGAR and his mighty weapon, the Steel Commander, stand between the remnants of true humanity and annihilation at the hands of the totally evil Dominators and the mindless mutant hordes they completely control.” That pretty much sums up the plot of the novel (which, once you get past the book’s cover, actually turns out to be titled Lord of the Swastika), and the alternate-history aspect is taken care of by an “About the Author” note at the beginning of the book and an “Afterword to the Second Edition” at the end, purportedly written in 1959 by a New York University academic named Homer Whipple. The bio tells us that after serving in the Great War and briefly dabbling in “radical politics”, Adolf Hitler emigrated to New York in 1919, where he first became a successful science fiction illustrator (for Amazing, no less) and then a science fiction writer himself, the author of such classics as Savior from Space, The Thousand Year Rule, The Master Race, and Tomorrow the World. In the afterword, Whipple chronicles Hitler’s literary career up until his death in 1953, afterwards analyzing Lord of the Swastika and finding in its fetishistic imagery the source of the book’s lasting appeal to hardcore science fiction fans, who awarded Hitler a posthumous Hugo in 1954… so what we have here is not a novel about an alternate history — it’s a novel from an alternate history. How is Lord of the Swastika? (Spinrad reportedly wanted the book to be published under that title, with only Hitler’s name on the cover, but was stymied by his publisher.) Well, based on my own reading about Der Führer (primarily the Bullock and Kershaw biographies, Speer’s memoirs, and Richard Evans’ history of the Third Reich), Spinrad is disquietingly successful at transmogrifying Hitler’s pathological obsessions and rigid, paranoid worldview into pulp science fiction, and one of the most remarkable things about the book is its uncomfortably pointed demonstration of how perfectly the themes and devices of pulp sf suit a violent, authoritarian imagination. In any case, being locked up inside Adolf’s head, even for satirical purposes, isn’t all that enjoyable, and well before the book ends, distaste begins to outweigh novelty, and you’re eager for the “author” to… well, blow his brains out. Spinrad may have been just a little too clever, and The Iron Dream might be one of those books that would be twice as effective at half the length. Still, it’s quite a ride, and I can’t think of another novel like it.

5. Spider Kiss by Harlan Ellison, 1961

Harlan Ellison was one of our best short story writers, but he produced only a few genuine novels. Among that handful, though, is one of his best works, his rock-and-roll novel Spider Kiss (which was originally published by Gold Medal — the mark of quality! — as Rockabilly). Country boy Luther Sellars has an abundance of musical ability and a limitless desire to push, claw, and gouge his way to the top, a vicious, elemental drive unmediated by any trace of scruple. After changing his name to Stag Preston, he succeeds in climbing to the pinnacle of pop music success, becoming the idol of millions. Stag’s unholy combination of ferocious ambition, demonic talent, and unbridled appetite (especially his sexual one) finally lead to his downfall, and after his scandalous excesses (which include some genuine and serious crimes) send him careening to the bottom, he ends his days playing is a sleazy strip joint, far from the big money and the bright lights, mercifully forgotten. Ellison clearly knew the great 1957 Elia Kazan film A Face in the Crowd, in which Andy Griffith excels as Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, a folksy entertainer whose good old boy demeanor conceals a very nasty streak and who plays out a rise-and-fall story very similar to Stag’s. Stag is, if anything, even worse than Rhodes, and the book is a riveting portrait of a driven and near-sociopathic personality. Ellison later retrofitted many elements of Stag’s character and story onto his script for the 1966 film The Oscar (in which the amoral user is an actor named Frank Fane), a movie so godawful it’s divine.

6. 85 Days: The Last Campaign of Robert Kennedy by Jules Whitcover, 1969

We’ve gotten used to some wild presidential elections over the last decade and a half, but few campaigns in American history were as chaotic, divisive, and ultimately tragic as the one all the way back in 1968. When President Lyndon Johnson announced that he was not going to run for re-election, Robert Kennedy at first publicly said that he wasn’t going to seek the nomination himself, a decision that went against all of his political instincts. It galled him to leave the field to Hubert Humphrey (Johnson’s vice-president and a man likely to continue LBJ’s war policies) and the upstart anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy, but when McCarthy’s surprising early success showed the potential strength of an anti-Vietnam War candidate, Kennedy threw his hat into the ring. A frantic campaign followed, with RFK scrambling to put together an organization, enter primaries, and make up an enormous amount of lost ground. Along the way, Kennedy earned the animus of McCarthy (for stealing his thunder — and his young, anti-war voters) and Johnson (for opposing his policies), made Kennedy history by losing one primary (Oregon), gained some momentum by winning others (South Dakota, Nebraska), and was called on to help the country weather the shock of the Martin Luther King jr. assassination, a bare eight weeks before his own death at the hands of Sirhan Sirhan on the night he won his greatest victory in California — all in eighty-five days (three weeks less than Vice President Harris had in her own truncated campaign). Whitcover’s book is a definitive account of one of the most dramatic political contests in our history, a kind of combat-photographer snapshot taken at a moment when the country seemed hurtling toward the apocalypse — and not for the last time.

7. The Last Policeman Trilogy (The Last Policeman, Countdown City, World of Trouble) by Ben H. Winters, 2012-2014

If you think things are bad now, take heart — they could be worse. The world could be ending literally rather than metaphorically; there could be a ginormous asteroid on a collision course with earth that will extinguish human civilization on impact, which is the situation faced by Hank Palace at the beginning of The Last Policeman trilogy. The first volume, The Last Policeman, begins with the asteroid (named “Maia”) still six months away and the chances of impact rising but still less than one hundred percent. Before the end of the book, doom has become a mathematical certainty and Palace and everyone else on earth are faced with the Big Question — what do you do when everything is coming to an end? You keep doing your job, of course; it’s that or go crazy in one of a thousand different ways. There’s no shortage of people going that route, but Palace chooses the first option; despite knowing how ultimately futile his efforts are, he continues to get up every morning and show up for work as a Concord, New Hampshire police detective, spending his dwindling stock of days trying to keep his small part of the world from falling to pieces. Through the course of the three books, Palace investigates murders (in a world where the innocent and the guilty alike are about to experience maximum punishment) and a strange disappearance (in a world where increasing numbers of people are walking away from the rubble that’s all that’s left of pre-Maia society) and most personally, trying to find his troubled sister Nico, who has vanished into the chaos; he has some things to settle with her before the end. What does any of it matter? Well, Winters has said the theme of the trilogy is, “Why does anybody do anything?” Each volume (almost each chapter in each volume, in fact) is more involving than the one that preceded it (increasing tension is built into the premise) and aside from being a gripping read, the series really does prompt reflection on the meaning of human actions when the actors are faced with unavoidable death — which we all are, asteroid or no asteroid.

8. 1876 by Gore Vidal, 1976

Electoral chicanery is as old as the republic itself, and who better to describe perhaps the greatest example of it in our history than Gore Vidal, America’s premier historical novelist? In this, the third novel in his six-volume Narratives of Empire series (following Burr and Lincoln in internal chronology), Vidal fictionalizes the centennial election of 1876, when the presidency was stolen from the Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden (remember him? Of course you don’t!) by the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, or at least by his faction. Post-Civil War bitterness (the tactic of “waving the bloody shirt” to brand all Democrats as crypto-Confederate traitors reached new heights during the contest) led to outrageous underhandedness and outright fraud across multiple states. In South Carolina, for example, 101 percent of all eligible voters voted (take that, electoral apathy!) and many of the things that we’ve become drearily familiar with reared their ugly heads, such as disputed electors, confusing or deceptive ballot designs, and rancorous squabbles about the counting and certifying of electoral votes. With Inauguration Day approaching and the results a snarl beyond untangling, Congress headed off increasing financial and political chaos (to say nothing of threats of violence — Hayes’ home was shot at shortly after Election Day) by creating a special bipartisan electoral commission to reach some kind of resolution, with the result that the Republican candidate became the nineteenth President of the United States… by one electoral vote. (Tilden’s consolation prize was winning the popular vote; I’m sure that kept him warm at night.) All of Vidal’s virtues are on display here; no one depicted drawing-room politics (or any other kind, for that matter) with more elegant irony or acerbic wit. This Jamesian comedy of manners has the kind of effortless style that makes it easy to miss the cold-steel scalpel in the author’s hand, and he uses the knife to mercilessly dissect the corruptions and hypocrisies of Hayes’ and Tilden’s time, and, by implication, our own.

9. The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez, 1975

In The Autumn of the Patriarch Gabriel García Márquez uses the techniques of magical realism that he employed in One Hundred Years of Solitude to portray the life and (maybe) death of the archetypal figure of a military tyrant or Caudillo, embodied in a nameless Caribbean dictator. Instead of using the tools of objective realism to depict the surface of his dictator’s reign, García Márquez employs symbol, metaphor and dream to place us in the lightless mind of his radically isolated protagonist. The book (the English translation is by Gregory Rabassa, who also did the magnificent translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude) is not for the faint of heart — it has one sentence that’s fifty pages long. Most of the novel consists of a stream of consciousness that runs so deep you can easily drown in it, but the method yields dividends that couldn’t have been gained in any other way; in one extraordinary, hallucinatory scene, in his greed and callousness the monomaniacal “General of the Universe” (his official title) sells off the Caribbean Sea to the Americans who keep his regime propped up; the Gringos send helicopters to fly off huge sections of the Sea, which has been cut up into numbered squares, leaving only a desiccated, sea-bottom desert behind. The book exuberantly chronicles the General’s flagrant excesses — political, military, familial, financial, rhetorical, sexual — but García Márquez’s greatest triumph is that his art moves us beyond mere externals, imprisoning us in the free-floating abattoir that must have been the mind of a Somoza, a Stalin, a Franco, a Mao.

10. Advise and Consent by Allen Drury, 1959

Though the current confirmation battles roiling the Hallowed Halls of the Capitol may seem especially contentious and nasty, the process of getting even a mildly questionable nominee through the Senate has always been a bloodsport. If you doubt that, just read Allen Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Advise and Consent. (The title comes from Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, which gives the President the power to appoint various federal officers and officials with the “Advice and Consent of the Senate.”) When liberal golden boy Robert Leffingwell is nominated by the president for Secretary of State, the confirmation process is expected to go smoothly, and it does — until a witness surfaces with evidence that Leffingwell had once been a communist (a charge that the nominee has unequivocally denied under oath). Those in favor of Leffingwell (a group that still includes the president) and those opposed to him begin to frantically maneuver for advantage, working night and day to discredit whatever evidence and witnesses are presented by the other side. Before the drama’s end, the president himself will be involved in blackmailing Utah Senator Brig Anderson, who has proof that Leffingwell’s testimony was a lie. Anderson had a homosexual encounter in his past, and the prospect of that incident becoming public knowledge drives him to commit suicide in his Senate office (a plausible outcome in 1959 — and something very much like it had actually happened in 1954). In the wake of this tragedy, the evidence against Leffingwell gets out, along with the president’s role in its suppression, with the result that the nomination goes down to a decisive defeat. Allen Drury (whom Richard Nixon believed to be secretly gay himself) was a seasoned Washington reporter who knew all the back-room details of how the sausage was made, and after over sixty years, Advise and Consent still deserves its reputation as one of the greatest of American political novels. Drury must have agreed — he wrote five more books carrying the story and characters forward into a shrewdly speculative political future. Otto Preminger directed an excellent film version in 1962, with Henry Fonda as the flawed nominee and Charles Laughton (in his final role) as Senator Seab Cooley, Leffingwell’s most intractable opponent.

11. The Loneliest Campaign: The Truman Victory of 1948 by Irwin Ross, 1968

Everyone loves an incredible comeback staged by a tenacious underdog, right? Well, um… maybe not everybody. But if you crave a candidate wielding a pugnacious (and sometimes profane) campaigning style to present himself as a battler for the common man against out-of-touch elites, if you delight in baffling and egregious polling errors, if you yearn to see a complacent national press stunned by an unexpected outcome that they find simply incomprehensible, then have I got a story for you! No, not that one; it’s not necessary to look back just a month or two, because our grandparents (or great-grandparents!) saw it first back in 1948, when Harry Truman, unanimously written off by the media as a comically inept buffoon, came roaring from behind to defeat supposed shoo-in Thomas E. Dewey for the presidency. Truman, the low-class ward-heeler, the Missouri machine politician who was tapped for vice-president when Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to jettison his previous running mate, the increasingly problematic Henry Wallace, became president when FDR died three months into his fourth term. Shackled by foreign policy problems and an unstable economy, Truman (often derided as “His Accidency”) ended his slightly-shortened first term with near-historically low approval ratings. Good thing polls are never wrong. Dewey, brimming with confidence, decided that it wasn’t necessary to win the presidency; he just had to be careful not to lose it. He therefore confined himself to bland, noncommittal statements that were so general as to be essentially meaningless. The Louisville Carrier-Journal mercilessly (but accurately) said that Dewey’s major speeches “can be boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. Our future lies ahead.” Truman, meanwhile, fought his way off the ropes with a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckle exuberance that, fairly or not, laid all of the country’s ills squarely at the feet of Dewey’s Republican Party. When the dust settled, Harry Truman had won one of the unlikeliest second terms in American history, though it’s probably dropped from first place to second in that regard. The Loneliest Campaign is an engaging look at one of the most colorful presidential contests ever, and the book’s conclusion, written in 1968 about the election of 1948, is just as valuable today: “In the end, the most salutary consequence of 1948 was probably a renewed awareness of the contingent quality of events, of the unpredictability of both leadership in a democracy and of the choices that voters make in the privacy of the voting booth. Not for a long time afterward were politicians likely to take the American voter for granted.” We can hope that recent events have provided a much-needed refresher course in that uncomfortable truth.

12. The Road by Cormac McCarthy, 2006

What do you do when nothing is left of all that you and those who went before you have built but charred rubble and blackened ashes? You hold on tightly to the one most precious to you and make your way through whatever lies ahead one day at a time, trying to keep alive a spark of belief that one day, things will get better. In Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, a father and a son (we never learn their names; in this place names are needless encumbrances, relics of a dead past) painfully make their way through a shattered world, looking for somewhere they can rest and find peace, knowing that such a place almost certainly doesn’t exist. We don’t know what happened to the world and neither do they. What does it matter? The only reality is trying to keep their bodies and souls alive in a world implacably inimical to both. Most of the devices of the standard post-apocalyptic story are here, images and incidents that have become familiar (even shopworn) through their use in countless books, movies and television shows: searching for uncontaminated water or a slightly better piece of clothing, picking through dead buildings for canned food, exchanging a word or two with other scarecrow-like wayfarers, the dazed, the dead-eyed, the demented, and hiding from other creatures that were once human but that the universal catastrophe has rendered nothing but feral beasts without mercy or compassion. As they push their shopping-cart (their most precious possession, bearing the few pitiful belongings that are everything they own) through this hellscape, “carrying the fire” (an image for preserving and protecting the human that recurs through much of McCarthy’s work), the vision is almost unendurable in its pitiless extremity — but only almost. It is true that no blows are softened, but we are kept going by two things: the bleached beauty of McCarthy’s extraordinary prose and the desperate love of the father and son, who are, quite literally, all the world to each other. Along the way, we get things no other writer could have given us, like the scene where the pair briefly take refuge in a well-stocked underground bunker that they discover, where the father gives his child a drink, a draught from a world and a life that have vanished forever — Coca-Cola. The father’s delight at his son’s stunned amazement at this drink that seems almost alive, followed immediately by his sadness at knowing that his boy will never taste it again, are emotionally overwhelming, as is the book as a whole. The Road will make you weep; it will make your heart ache unbearably before breaking it in pieces, but this bleak journey ends with the fire still burning; at the end, against all odds, the father has passed the flame on by saving his son, and when you finish this remarkable novel, you will feel that light and heat burning anew in yourself.

Of the twelve books I’ve listed here, only The Loneliest Campaign is currently out of print, but it’s relatively easy to find used on Ebay or from other sources; the other books are all readily available in physical or electronic formats.

So, (again repeating my words of eight years ago), “there you have it: a dozen histories, actual and alternate, maps of action or aids to contemplation, to help you get through all the days of farce and folly that lay ahead, as we do our best to cope with the real history that we’re all trapped in.”

Oh, one more thing — I’m damn sure not doing this again in 2028 (or, God help us, 2032)!

Thomas Parker is a native Southern Californian and a lifelong science fiction, fantasy, and mystery fan. When not corrupting the next generation as a fourth grade teacher, he collects Roger Corman movies, Silver Age comic books, Ace doubles, and despairing looks from his wife. His last article for us was Say It Ain’t So

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

Language is fun. The way words can mean more than one thing, depending on where the stress is placed, or its location in a sentence, and where that sentence lies within the tale. It is a playground. A song devising its own music. A melody murmured that can delight not just the eyes, but the ears. How many have paused a read simply to revel in the words just read? To read and reread a sentence? To bask in the brilliance of a cleverly turned phrase?

Image by Лариса Мозговая from Pixabay

Yet so many decry the joy in that play. Brevity, they proclaim, is king. Only he shall rule the pages, painted words slinking away beneath his stern gaze. That is good writing. The only good writing.

In truth, he is but a soldier, which, like his fellows, when craftily deployed becomes a part of a larger song. The short notes like bombs, delivered with precision to inspire fear, or awe. To drag at the breath, stealing it away. To raise the pulse; a rapid fire of words – rat-tattat-tat!

Ah! But the exhaustion of battle needs reprieve. Across the trenched-scarred fields where fearful clouds of pale green gas linger still, hugging the ground as a jealous devotee, there must be some tenderness. Some beauty. Some gentle caress that reveals a painted sky, a lone flower refusing to bow before the fire, to linger ever so longingly on a lover’s heart.

These, too, deserve their time to shine. To dance in the light. Frivolous! come the cries. Pointless! Indulgent! Foolish! What purpose could frills and silks fill that isn’t achieved with more utilitarian cloth?

Beauty, my loves. Beauty is the point. To paint with words. To make poetry of prose. To fill the pages with images that transcend description. To make the words felt instead of merely read. To revel in the wonder of words, and the music they can make if we indulge them ever so slightly. For, before they were written, they were said; every syllable deliberately placed to please, to create a rhythm, to dance with the flames beside which they were uttered.

There is no crime in returning to that fire, though the words reach an audience of naught but one. In reclaiming that dance. In revealing the beauty of words and the myriad of ways they can be put together.

Play, my dears. Play is the point. What fun to toy with meaning and expectation, to weave and weft! To delight in triplets trickling from tickled tongues. To find the fun; to splash in the sun-dappled stream of language and chase the meanings swimming lazily beneath the surface. For language can be such a joy if we let it, if we break free from the tyranny of Brevity for its own sake.

There is no sin in letting the words play. In delighting at their twisting, joyous clamour. To dance with them their strange magical rites.

So many tangled tales have been met with distaste from one, only to be adored by another. Many a phrase has stopped an artist in their tracks, struck by the beauty, only to be scorned by the scholar.

In truth, there is no proper way to present prose. Dance or do not. Play or do not. Let the tyrant Brevity reign over the page, or place him back down into the ranks to work in concert with his fellows, or abandon him altogether. It is all correct. It is all true. It is all right.

But turn not away from the colour purple because some fool said you must. Like Brevity, it has its place and its purpose, even if that purpose is simply to be frivolous, existing for nothing else but the music it makes.

Or maybe even to inflate a word count. Ahem.

Alright, I’m done playing now. Mostly. Though I’ve been terribly tongue-in-cheek with this post, the sentiment is true. I do love reading books where the author has permitted themselves to revel in the language they use; when it’s clear that they’re going not for strict adherence to the rules and order, but to create an image, to paint, to evoke an emotion.

Yes, learn the rules. Of course.

And then smash them to pieces.

Is it possible to mess it up? Yes. Perhaps it doesn’t quite work. But that’s the wonderful thing about words. They’re much like painting in oils. You can massage the colours, work them across the canvas until they form the pleasing shapes you were aiming for. Or simply scrape teh canvas clean and start again. But don’t be so afraid of messing it up that you never attempt to paint at all. Take the time to play with words. Have fun.

Know that there will be a reader who will love your “purple” prose. It will likely be me, since I love how wonderful and musical language can be.

What about you? What writing styles do you like? There are no wrong answers in this case, only differing opinions. And I love hearing them!

When S.M. Carrière isn’t brutally killing your favorite characters, she spends her time teaching martial arts, live streaming video games, and cuddling her cat. In other words, she spends her time teaching others to kill, streaming her digital kills, and a cuddling furry murderer. Her most recent titles include Daughters of Britain, Skylark and Human. Her serial The New Haven Incident is free and goes up every Friday on her blog.

The story of Troy has been my favorite myth since I was a little kid. Greek mythology is far and away my favorite (Norse is a distant second), and I used to check Bullfinch’s out of my grade school library and lug it home. That was a relatively big book. I have my own copy now, of course.

The worst part, is I always root for the Trojans. It never ends well for them. If they had just listened to Laocoon. Though, Athena definitely made that a dangerous proposition…

I’ve used a couple names from Thieves World over the years, in various online RPGs. But hands down, the Iliad has been my main source. Hector, and some variation of Astyanax (I prefer it with more ‘N’ or ‘X’, has far and away my favorite names for fighters (especially paladins). I’ve used a few others, like Penthesilia, Cassandra, and Deiphobus (Helenus just doesn’t work for me).

Way back in pre-Windows days (I think), there was a really cool computer game that included a Troy section. I think you were Jason with his Argonauts, roaming the world. Age of Empires II (man, I played the heck out of that) included a Troy campaign (except I had to sack Troy. Sniff, sniff). There’s a Total War: Troy (kind of a scaled down TW game) that I don’t have yet. You might have read over the past couple weeks that I’m a huge Total War: Warhammer I/II fan.

I don’t do the Assassin’s Creed series, butt there was an Odyssey game, recently. The Odyssey is essentially a sequel to The Iliad. As is Virgil’s The Aeneid.

I read a few translations over the years. But the only version I do now is Robert Fagles’ audiobook. Which, unfortunately, is abridged. I always try to get unabridged versions of books. But for some reason, they never did an unabridged for Fagles. I don’t know what got left out, but it still totally works for me.

I talked about it here, and Derek Jacobi is absolutely FANTASTIC. Probably the best-read audiobook I’ve ever listened to. They had Ian McKellen do Fagles’ Odyssey, and Simon Callow read The Aeneid (Callow is number two, with McKellan still good, but third). Jacobi is nothing short of brilliant.

As I’ve talked about here at Black Gate before, audiobooks let me get to things I otherwise would not read. Old, and new. About once a year, I listen to The Iliad CDs in my car, during the work commute. Some years, I follow it up with The Odyssey. I don’t do The Aeneid that often, but I have listened to it more than once.

The Iliad and The Odyssey are believed to be written not very long apart; both in Greek. As with some of Paul’s Epistles, some think Homer did not author both. I’m just gonna go with ‘Yes, he did.’ The Aeneid as written some six centuries later, in Latin.

Highly recommend Fagles’ translation, with Jacobi’s reading. I have him doing some Sherlock Holmes and it’s okay. But he slays The Iliad.

The Iliad ends with Hector’s funeral games. Homer recounts some of the events after – including that frigging horse – in The Odyssey.

There were other poems by other poets, about The Trojan War. For example, Arctinus of Miletus wrote the five-book Aethiopis. It started right after The Iliad ended, with the arrival of the the Amazon Queen, Penthesileia

There are six additional poems, but sadly, they’re lost. About thirty lines of Lesches of Pyrrha’s Little Iliad is the largest surviving excerpt of these lost Ilios stories. Along with The Iliad and The Odyssey, they make up The Epic (or Trojan) Cycle. Click here for a short look at the lost poems.

I bought Heinrich Schliemann’s Ilios decades ago. It is not exactly light reading. The Mortal Hero is a nice intro to The Iliad, and I recommend that for somebody wanting to dig into it, without actually reading the epic. Though I think should read Homer.

The Brad Pitt movie, Troy, was a big-budget telling of the story. It took out all the mythology. Maybe that made sense from an on-screen perspective, but I was disappointed. It’s an okay movie. I waited a long time for somebody to make Troy, and to make 42 (the Jackie Robinson story). I much prefer the latter.

I tried to sit through the 2018 mini-series, Troy: Fall of A City. What an unwatchable load of garbage.

On my ever-growing ‘To Write About’ list here at Black Gate, is Rex Stout’s The Great Legend. Stout, of course, created Nero Wolfe, who I have written about extensively here at Black Gate. He took the gods out of the picture, and told an alternate story. I like it.

Stephen Fry has written three apparently ‘different’ books on Greek mythology, with book three on Troy. I’m not interested, and haven’t checked them out.

I’m listening to Barry Strauss’ 2007 book, The Trojan War: A New History. The reader’s voice doesn’t do much for me so it’s gonna be a slow almost 9 hours, but it’s interesting enough, an hour in.

An idea I’ve had,which I won’t commit the time and effort to, is a daily FB series. I would post amusing (to me) daily updates from some embedded poet/journalist:
“And we’ve landed on a rather nice beach. I imagine we’ll wrap this up in a week or two and head back home.”

Or maybe a foot soldier in the Greek ranks:
“Man, Achilles was in a foul mood this morning. That guy needs to lighten up.”

 

So, this has just been some rambling on something I’ve been interested in for most of my life.

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, 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.