Charles Beaumont
Today, January 2, is the birthday of Charles Beaumont (1929-1967). If there was an episode of the original Twilight Zone that stuck in your head when you say it, chances are good Beaumont wrote it.
Mentored by Ray Bradbury, Beaumont would have been a major writer if he had lived. He died from early onset Alzheimer’s or something very much like it. Beaumont, like Bradbury, was primarily a short story writer, although he wrote a number of movie scripts. Continue reading
Seabury Quinn
Seabury Quinn was born on New Year’s Day, 1889. He died Christmas Eve, 1969. At one time he was the most popular author publishing in Weird Tales. These days, his fame pales in comparison to that of HPL, REH, and CAS.Some people really like his work, while others (looks at Rusty Burke) consider him to be a hack. I’ve not read enough of his work to have an opinion (yet).
The stories about his occult detective, Jules de Grandin, were recently published in an affordable five volume edition. Quinn wrote more than just de Grandin stories, though. I’m going to try to read some of them this year as well as start working my way through the de Grandin stories.
Karl Edward Wagner Continue reading
Today, December 7, is the birthday of Leigh Brackett (1915-1978). That’s big deal here.
For today’s birthday post, I’m going to look at “The Beast-Jewel of Mars”. It was first published in the Winter 1948 issue of Planet Stories. It is currently available in the ebook Martian Quest (not to be confused with the omnibus of the same name from Haffner Press. That one is out of print. Amazon lists one copy of the Haffner volume for $256.)
Burk Winters is a spaceship captain who has resigned. His fiance, Jill Leland, took a flier out into the desert. Her flier was found crashed, but her body is missing. He’s going to look for her. Burk has an unusual plan to do that.
There’s a Martian practice known as Shanga, the going-back. In it a person regresses to a more primitive state. It’s like a legalized drug. There are Shanga parlors, sort of like opium dens, but the experience is weak. Burk wants the full experience, which is technically illegal. Jill was a Shanga addict, and Burk is hoping to find her.
Here’s how Brackett describes what Burk sees when he goes to a Shanga parlor.
Their faces (the Earthmen’s) were pallid and effeminate, scored with the haggard marks of life lived under the driving tension of a super-modren age.
A Martian woman sat in an alcove, behind a glassite desk. She was dark, sophisticatedly lovely. Her costume was the aftfully adapted short rove of ancient Mars, and she wore no ornament. Her slanting topaz eyes regarded Burk Winters with professional plesantness, but deep in them he could see the scorn and the pride of a race so old that the Terran exquisites of the Trade Cities were only crude children beside it.
Burk goes to an ancient city on a canal, a city that was once a port on an ancient sea, now long dry. There he undergoes Shanga, and he finds a lot more than he bargains for.
Leigh Brackett
One of the pleasures of reading Brackett is that, like REH, she could describe action with poetry. She can set a mood with a few lines of description like few writers can. There is a strong undercurrent of anti-colonialism in this story. That’s something of a trend today in what’s being currently written. Brackett shows the effects of colonialism in this story, and she didn’t need a doorstop of a book to do it. And she does it without neglecting character or action.
Burk is like many of Brackett’s characters. He’s a hard, bitter man who is looking for a lost love. This is a theme that crops up often in Brackett’s work, and in her hands, it’s always fresh.
I found “The Beast-Jewel of Mars” to be an excellent story. I’m not going to give the ending away. I’ll let you read it for yourself. There’s something about Brackett’s work that speaks to me deep in my soul. Yeah, I know, that sounds pretty deep. But her work scratches an itch that few other writers can. You should check her out if you haven’t yet.
Today, December 4, is the birthday of Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968). I featured some of his novels in this year’s Black Friday post. If you want to write intense, suspenseful stories, you could do a lot worse that study Woolrich. I’m not going to review anything; it’s been one of those days. But check him out. His novels and short stories are well worth the time.
Today, November 25, is the birthday of Poul Anderson (1926-2001). Anderson was a master of both fantasy and science fiction. I’ll have a review of some of his sf going up at Futures Past and Present in a day or so.
The quote above is one I hadn’t seen before getting ready to work on this post. It is a perfect encapsulation of Anderson’s work. He was always entertaining, first and foremost. And what he’s saying there is spot on. There’s too much dull message fiction being published these days, where the message is more important that the entertainment.
So if you want entertainment, in either science fiction or fantasy, check out some Poul Anderson.
Today, November 24, marks the birth of Eric Rucker Eddison (1882-1945). E. R. Eddison was one of the giants of the fantasy field in the early 20th Century and enjoyed a brief resurgence in the 1960’s and 70’s when Ballantine reprinted four of his novels, The Worm Ouroboros and the Zimiamvia Trilogy, consisting of Mistress of Mistresses, A Fish Dinner in Memison, and The Mezentian Gate. These books are not light reading.Eddison’s style is suited to contemporary tastes. I’ve only read Worm, and that was in my undergraduate days (or high school. I forget.) I liked it and would read it again, as well as the others, if I can get a large block of time.
Today, November 23, marks the birth of two writers whose work I have enjoyed and intend to read more.
First is Nelson S. Bond (1908-2006). Bond wrote mostly short fiction in the 1940s and 1950s, although he had a few novels serialized. Arkham House published several collections of his work in the mid-2000s. He is best remembered for the Lancelot Biggs, Spaceman series.
The other is Wilson Tucker (1914-2006). Tucker wrote both novels and short fiction. His best known novel was The Year of the Quiet Sun. He wrote a short story about a man on death row who claimed he would escape by walking through the wall. I loved the twist on the end of that one.
Both of these men wrote entertaining science fiction and fantasy and deserve to be rediscovered.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
Today, November 21, is the birthday of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944). Quiller-Couch wrote ghost stories. The last time a collection of his was in print was when Ash-Tree Press published The Horror on the Stair and Other Weird Tales. That was back in 2000. I’m somewhat surprised that some other publisher hasn’t come out with a collection since. “The Roll-Call of the Reef” is currently available in The Third Ghost Story Megapack.
Tonight’s selection is a nice little tale about a friendship between the trumpeter of a cavalry unit and the drummer boy from the British marines. They were the only survivors of their respective ships, both wrecked on the same night. The trumpeter is unable to return to his duties because of his injuries. The drummer boy recovers and goes back to the service. But not before they become the best of friends who play their instruments together whenever they can.
The drummer boy isn’t heard from for a few years. When he does return, he’s now a young man. He and the trumpeter have one final duty to perform.
I’ll not say anymore about the ending except to say I rather liked it. The roll-call aspect was a nice way to handle things, I thought.
Ghost stories at Christmas aren’t really an American tradition (yes, I know it’s not Thanksgiving yet), but I’m going to try to read more through the rest of the year. I have a collection that has an E. F. Benson story in it that hadn’t been reprinted since its original publication.
Today, November 19, marks the birth of Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1911-1995). She died on November 13, six days shy of her 84th birthday. She wrote short fiction with much of her early stories appearing in Weird Tales. “The Three Marked Pennies” is probably her best known story.
I haven’t had time to read any of her work today, but I have two books sitting on my shelf from Valancourt Press that are on the docket for the holidays. Monster, She Wrote is a nonfiction book full of brief biographies of women who wrote horror and science fiction. It has launched a series of collections under that title, the second of which is The Women of Weird Tales. Several of Ms. Counselman’s stories are included.
I wrote a post a few years ago about women in the early days of the fantasy and science fiction fields, so the reviews of these books will act as followups to that one.