Author Archives: Keith West

Amazing Stories Returns to Publishing Fiction

A Look at Beneath Ceaseless Skies #120

It’s been a little while since I last reviewed an issue of BCS. The current issue contains the usual two stories, one with steampunk themes, which is a little different than what you usually find here.

First up, “The Clockwork Trollop” by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald. A scientist in Victorian England try to reduce the number of women engaging in prostitution by creating an untiring and hygienic lady of the night. (He envisions training the current prostitutes to maintain their replacements.) Like much social engineering, this one has some serious unexpected consequences.

This was a relatively short story, and the general way things end up isn’t exactly unexpected. Still, Doyle and Macdonald do a good job of capturing the feel of the times. This one had an aura of Arthur Conan Doyle hanging over it.

The longer of the two stories was “The Drowned Man” by Laura E. Price. This is a complex tale about two sisters who are returning from an island that isn’t entirely in this world. They’ve recovered an artifact for a museum and are hoping the museum will hire them in this capacity on a regular basis. While in the middle of the ocean, they spot a man in the water. At first they think he’s drowned, but when the ship’s crew pulls him onboard they discover he’s still alive.

They should be asking themselves why he’s still alive if he’s in the middle of the ocean…

The thing I liked most about this one were the hints regarding the two sisters. Ms. Price seems to have worked out the backstory quite thoroughly. I’m not sure if “The Drowned Man” is a stand alone with a detailed background, the inaugural installment of a new series, or only the most recent episode of a series already begun. I rather hope there are either other stories about these characters out there, more to come, of both. The sisters aren’t exactly lady-like nor are the the kind of women warmly welcomed in polite society. The author hints they may have been raised by a witch, so that probably has something to do with it.

Anyway, an enjoyable issue, although the subject matter of “The Clockwork Trollop” might not be to everyone’s taste. The next issue should be out within a few days, so look for another review soon.

RIP, Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013)

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The Golden Voyage of Sinbad

The world got a little darker today with the announcement of the passing of Ray Harryhausen. A pioneer of stop-motion special effects, Harryhausen’s influence on the film industry cannot be overstated. Much of the special effects we enjoy today can be traced back to his work. While the technology is completely different from when he started in the industry, the high standards he achieved set the bar for those who followed after him. Highlights of his work include The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974), and Clash of the Titans (1981). His movies can still bring out the kid in me (which is admittedly not hard to do).

Rest in peace, sir.

The Next Two Weeks

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Just a quick update since things are going to be hectic for the next two weeks. Today and tomorrow are the last two class day. Wednesday is Dead Day (when students supposedly study), then finals start on Thursday. I’m giving two, one Saturday evening and the other first thing Monday. In between then, I’ve got to compile the lab grades for 4 courses (~1500 students). The latter involves making sure all the TAs followed the grading rubric and nobody’s averages are out of line.

What that means is I probably won’t be blogging with any consistency until all of that is done. I’ll try to post every couple of days, but most things will either be opinion pieces or reviews of short fiction.

When the smoke clears, I’m going to try to read some titles from Pyr that have been piling up. The good folks there have started sending me review copies of nearly everything they’ve published lately, for which I would like to thank them.

Over the last year I’ve bought some titles by Nightshade authors which I’ve not gotten around to reading. I’m going to move those books up in priority. A number of good authors have gotten caught in a bad spot, and I’d like to help them if I can with some publicity.

So if it looks like I’m only reading a few publishers, that’s why. I’ll read some other things for review as well just to keep the variety up. For instance, there’s that new Margaret Brundage bio that’s supposed to ship later this week…

The summer should be slower than the spring has been, so I hope I’ll be able to post fairly regularly over the summer.

Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who stopped by in April, both here and at Futures Past and Present. Both blogs saw record traffic, and I appreciate the interest you’ve shown.

Nefarious Mad Scientist Scheme: Freezing the Atmosphere

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As a demonstration in class this past week, I and one of my henchmen froze a small portion of the atmosphere.

That’s it in the bell jar. If it looks like ice floating in liquid, it is. Before we froze the atmosphere, it needed to be liquified.

The process was amazingly simple. Once the atmosphere was liquified, all we had to do was boil it.

I call the device the atmosphere-freezinator.

So, unless you want me to freeze the entire atmosphere of the Earth, you’ll deposit.$500 in US currency each month in one of the following offshore accounts-

Excuse me, there’s someone at the door. I’ll finish delivering this ultimatum once I’ve dealt with them.

Who left this platypus on the doorstep? And why is he wearing a fedora?

Hey, where’d you get that- Urk!

To see more pictures and find out what’s really going on, click the link below (if you’re accessing this from the main page of the blog) to read more:

This demonstration really is pretty simple, but you have to have equipment that can handle extremely low temperatures.

What we did was take liquid nitrogen, which makes up about 78% of our atmosphere. We really did boil it, but we didn’t put a flame on it. (That would have produced a gas under high pressure in a small volume, or what in layman’s terms is called a bomb. I’m a mad scientist, not a suicidal one.)

Rather, the bell jar is sealed so that it’s airtight. Once the liquid nitrogen had reached thermal equilibrium with the plexiglass container it was in, we pumped the air out of the bell jar. You can see the hose to the pump in the bottom of the picture on the right.

The lower pressure causes the liquid nitrogen to begin to boil. Boiling is a cooling process. Most people don’t think it is because they only boil water on a stove, which has a heat source. The burner replaces the heat the boiling process removes from the water. If you take a pan of boiling water off the stove, it will boil for a second or two then stop. That’s because the boiling lowers the temperature. This is the same principle behind many air conditioning and refrigeration systems. It’s also the principle behind evaporative cooling, which is why a breeze on a warm day feels cool.

Let me try to explain it this way. The phase change from liquid to gas requires energy to break the bonds in the liquid. That energy has to come from somewhere. In this case it comes from the liquid nitrogen itself. That lowers the temperature of the liquid nitrogen. (See, I told you it was a cooling process.)

Nitrogen becomes a liquid at 77K (-321 degrees Fahrenheit) and a solid at 63K (-346 F). These temperatures are quite close together, so it doesn’t take much of a drop in temperature for the liquid nitrogen to freeze.

We were able to freeze the liquid nitrogen completely solid. That’s it below. You can just see a small amount of liquid nitrogen along the bottom and sides.

With Emilie, in the Hollow World

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Emilie and the Hollow World
Martha Wells
Strange Chemistry, an imprint of Angry Robot Books
US/CAN Print
ISBN: 9781908844491
Format: Large Paperback
R.R.P.: $9.99
UK Print
ISBN: 9781908844484
Format: Medium Paperback
R.R.P.: £7.99
Ebook
ISBN: 9781908844507
Format: Epub & Mobi
R.R.P.: £5.49 / $6.99

Once upon a time there was a form of popular fiction in which a band of intrepid explorers ventured into new and uncharted lands. Often their adventures were of a somewhat fantastic nature, involving lost worlds and forgotten civilizations, the Professor Challenger novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle being a prime example of this type of fiction. Since much of it was written during Victorian times, the subgenre tends to have a Victorian and/or British Empire feel to it. For whatever reasons, the arbiters of taste and sophistication considered these adventures to be essentially for boys.

This subgenre has fallen from the heights of popularity it once enjoyed. The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this review. What is within the scope of the review is that Martha Wells has come along, dusted off the subgenre, given it a heroine to broaden its appeal beyond just boys, and shown us all how it’s done. Continue reading →

RIP, Andrew J. Offutt

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Locus is reporting that Andrew J. Offutt passed away earlier today. No cause of death was listed. He wrote a number of erotic novels, many of them science fiction, as well as fantasy. Included in his fantasy works are pastiches of the Robert E. Howard characters Conan and Cormac Mac Art.

As Charles Rutledge points out in his tribute, his greatest contribution to the field was as an editor rather than an author. He was the editor of the 5 volume Swords Against Darkness series of original sword and sorcery anthologies. I’ve got all but volume 3 (with duplicates of 2 and 5). I was considering doing a series of posts looking at each one when I track down volume 3. That plan hasn’t changed with Mr. Offutt’s passing. I’ve also got one or two of his novels around here somewhere I intend to read at some point.

Even though he hasn’t been active in sword and sorcery circles for a number of years (at least not that I know of), we’ve lost one of the major players from the sword and sorcery boom from the 70s.

The Gunfight at the OK Corral Like You’ve Never Seen it Before

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The Buntline Special
Mike Resnick
Pyr
Trade paper, $17.00
Kindle Nook $11.99 (note: ebook prices may vary)

One of the legendary gunfights of the Old West took place in Tombstone, Arizona, between the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday on one side and the McLaurys and Clantons on the other. Of course there were a number of things leading up to the gunfight and many consequences following.

Mike Resnick has taken a look at the gunfight through a steampunk fantasy lens. It’s a fascinating blend of fact, almost fact, and should have been fact shown from the point of view of Doc Holliday.

Before I go on, I have to say that for a while as I was reading I kept seeing and hearing Val Kilmer as Holliday. You may recall he played Holliday in the 1993 film Tombstone. Kilmer brought such a – [ We interrupt this review to bring you the following public service announcement:

Pyr publicist Lisa Michalski contacted me late last year asking if I would like a review copy of Mike Resnick’s latest Weird Western novel, The Doctor and the Rough Rider. I replied that while, yes, I would very much like a review copy, I hadn’t read the first two books in the series. Ms. Michalski very graciously sent me all three, for which I would like to thank her.

Since then a number of Pyr books have shown up without my asking, many of them second or third volumes in series I haven’t started yet. I’ve been acquiring the volumes I’ve needed, and I intend to read and review them all.

I would like to apologize to Ms. Michalski as well as editor Lou Anders for taking so long to read and review the titles they’ve sent me. I’ve had an extremely heavy load this semester, and my reading time has been curtailed like it hasn’t been in years. Guys, thank you for the books. I intend to read and review all the ones you’ve sent (plus the preceding volumes I haven’t read, since I hate starting series in the middle). I greatly appreciate your sending the review copies and only hope I haven’t appeared ungrateful or opportunistic by not having reviewed them yet.

Anyway, once finals are over in a couple of weeks, I intend to take some time off and get caught up on reading, blogging, and personal writing. About every second or third review here will be a Pyr title until I’ve caught up, so don’t be surprised at the sudden proliferation of Pyr titles. The straight science fiction titles will be reviewed over at Futures Past and Present.

We now return your regularly scheduled blog post, already in progress.] – Holliday to say “I’m your huckleberry” like he did in the film.

Val Kilmer, as Your Huckleberry, Doc Holliday

But you don’t want to hear about a 20 year old movie, you want to know about The Buntline Special. The premise of this series is that in an alternate timeline, the westward expansion of the United States has been stopped at the Mississippi River by the magic of Native American medicine men, Geronimo being chief among them. This hasn’t stopped individuals from moving westward, settling in many place that they settled in our timeline such as Texas, Colorado, and Tombstone. (I’m curious if Texas is still an independent nation in this universe. Resnick mentions Texas but doesn’t give much detail.)

In Tombstone, a pair of inventors, Thomas Edison and Ned Buntline, have been working and producing such things as electric lights, a horseless carriage, and mechanical whores that never tire. It’s the horseless carriage that is causing the most problems. The decreased demand for horses has made some of the local horse thieves antsy, particularly the Clantons. But what has really made Edison a target of assassination is that he has been contacted by the US government to find a way to defeat the spell preventing the US from expanding westward. That’s got the medicine man Hook Nose all in a tizzy. He cuts a deal with the Clantons to eliminate Edison to their mutual benefit.

The first attempt on Edison’s life cost Edison his arm, which he and Buntline replace with a mechanical arm. Upping the stakes, Hook Nose resurrects the recently killed gunslinger, Johnny Ringo (who is very much alive in the Tombstone of our timeline). In an effort keep Edison breathing, Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp send for Doc Holliday and Bat Masterson.

And thus the stage is set for one of the wildest showdowns in the Old West in any timeline.

There are two things Resnick excels at, and those are dialogue and attention to detail through painstaking research. (Well, actually, he excels at more than two, but those are the two things I want to focus on.) First, the dialogue. If you’ve read Resnick, you know how he makes conversation seem natural. The result is a story that flows, sounding as though real people are having real conversations.

The second is the detail. Resnick either knows his history, does his research, or as I suspect, both. He includes an extensive bibliography along with an appendix telling what really happened to the major players in our timeline. One of the most fun things about The Buntline Special was seeing what things Resnick kept the same and what things he changed in the telling of his tale. The result was staying up long after I should have been in bed one night researching some of the major players online. (That’s not a complaint, BTW.) I’d read quite a bit about Tombstone and the Earps, but that was over a decade ago, and memory, like radioactive substances, has a half-life. And in my case, not a very long half-life.

This was a highly enjoyable book. We’re seeing a resurgence in the weird western. Here’s one by a master.

There are two more books in this series so far, and the next one has Billy the Kid in it. I’m looking forward to what Resnick does with him.

Titles in Mike Resnick’s Weird Western series are currently featured books at the Adventures Fantastic Bookstore. The Buntline Special is on sale for $12.36 plus shipping.

A New Series by Tom Doolan

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“Blood from Sand”
Tom Doolan
Short Attention Span E-Publishing
$1.25 mobi epub PDF

A beautiful assassin on the run from an evil sorcerer. A lone warrior from a desert tribe who aids a woman in danger. Their lives will never be the same.

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you know that I’ve enjoyed the short fiction of Tom Doolan (reviewed here, here, here, and here). Most of his work to date has involved orcs, but with “Blood from Sand” he goes in a different direction, adding to the current trend of Arabian Night style fantasy.

The story opens with Mazlochan and his djinn companion on patrol. When he sees a beautiful woman being pursued by four thugs across the desert, he intervenes.

The woman is Lily, an assassin. She’s on the run from her former employer, the sorcerer El Ahmar. By aiding her, Mazlochan runs the risk of bringing El Ahmar’s wrath down upon his village.

And if you want to know any more, then buy the story and read the rest. This is a short story, after all, and I don’t want the review to be longer than the story itself.

And if you enjoy sword and sorcery, you should read it. This is the beginning of a new series, and I’m looking forward to reading more installments. Doolan seems to be mainly setting things up for future adventures. This story was fairly short, but I can see the potential for longer works.

The action is well done, and the combat scenes move quickly. Doolan’s prose is smoother than I remember it being in his earlier stories, and I had no complaints about the prose there. What I’m saying is that he’s getting better, which is what any writer worth his/her salt would want to have happen.

“Blood from Sand” is only available in electronic format. Since Doolan has published all his previous work in electronic format, he knows what he’s doing. I bought the epub version. There were no formatting problems or typos that I noticed. The layout was good. The cover art has a professional appearance. This was a good buy from the formatting perspective. I wish some of the major publishers could achieve the same.

Short Attention Span E-Publishing is Tom Doolan’s new venture, and “Blood from Sand” is his premier offering through SASE. I had no trouble with ordering. I placed my order one evening, and the next morning, Tom emailed me a zip file containing the story in all formats. Here’s wishing him much success with it.

Return to the Empire State in The Age Atomic

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The Age Atomic
Adam Christopher
Angry Robot Books
UK Print
ISBN: 9780857663139
Format: Medium Paperback
R.R.P.: £8.99
US/CAN Print
ISBN: 9780857663146
Format: Large Paperback
R.R.P.: US$14.99 CAN$16.99
Ebook
ISBN: 9780857663153
Format: Epub & Mobi
R.R.P.: £5.49 / US$6.99

The Age Atomic is the sequel to Adam Christopher’s debut novel, Empire State (reviewed here). Since that book was published, he’s also produced a superhero novel, Seven Wonders, which has been in my TBR pile since last summer. (The Great Move happened just after that and really threw my reading schedule off; I still haven’t caught up.)

The Age Atomic continues the story begun in the first installment of this series. When the tale opens, private investigator Rad Bradley is in the process of stumbling on a plot involving an army of robots. If that weren’t bad enough, the Skyguard has disappeared. So has Captain Carson. The Fissure has as well, cutting off the Empire State from New York.

And speaking of New York, a dead woman named Evelyn McHale runs a government sponsored agency called Atoms for Peace. What she’s doing is building a robot army to invade the Empire State.

Evelyn McHale

Christopher pulls out all the stops in this one. There are not one but two robot armies. (I think I see one of the reasons this novel appealed to this particular publisher.) The writing was smoother and the characters more defined than in Empire State. That was one of the things that appealed to me. Christopher carefully selects some of the minor characters and lets us in on things from their viewpoints. It deepens the story and gives it more of an epic feel. What’s happening isn’t a battle between a few superpowered mystery men. It will have an impact on everyone, great and small. By fleshing out the bit players, the walk-ons, and the redshirts, Christopher adds a layer of humanity to his story.

The action moved the story along at a fast clip. There are plenty of chases, fights, and intrigue for fans of pulp fiction. There isn’t as much superhero action as there was in the previous novel, but that’s more than made up for by the robot armies.

If you liked Empire State, this is one you will most certainly enjoy. Pick it up. Adam Christopher’s books are currently Featured Books at Adventures Fantastic Books.

Here’s a sample:

Open publication – Free publishing – More atompunk