Category Archives: Uncategorized

Don’t Eat From “The Goophered Grapevine”

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512YQNYX3XL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_“The Gophered Grapevine”
Charles W. Chesnutt

Charles W. Chesnutt was an African-American writer who published two volumes of short stories and a handful of novels in the late 1800s and early 190s. It’s his first collection that interests us here, since it consisted of “conjure” stories set in North Carolina.

The stories revolve around an elderly former slave named Uncle Julius McAdoo.  In this story, the unnamed narrator (who is white) has moved to North Carolina for his wife’s health and is looking to start a vineyard.

While visiting an old plantation that once had a thriving vineyard, he encounters an old former slave who is eating some grapes of a variety called scuppernongs.  Uncle Julius tells the narrator that he once worked on the plantation and that the man shouldn’t buy it because the vineyard had been goophered (hexed).   Continue reading →

Latest Issue of Weirdbook is Now Available

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Weirdbook31Weirdbook 31
Douglas Draa, ed.
160 pgs.
Wildside Press, publisher
Paperback $12, ebook $3.99 US, L 7.99 print, L 2.99 ebook UK
Amazon   Amazon UK

Before I begin this review, I’d like to thank Douglass Draa and John Betancourt for providing both electronic and print review copies.

There are 19 pieces of fiction here along with 8 poems by new and established authors. The Table of Contents is provided at the end of the review.  I’m not going to try to provide a synopsis for all of them.  Some are quite short.  I don’t want my discussion of any of the stories to be longer than the stories themselves.  So I’m going to take a different approach. Continue reading →

The Aeronaut’s Windlass is Rollicking Great Fun

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Aeronaut's WindlassThe Aeronaut’s Windlass
Jim Butcher
Roc
Hardcover $27.95 630 pgs.
ebook $13.99

Before I get started, I’d like to thank Roc books for providing me with the review copy.

Now, in three words, my reaction upon turning the last page of The Aeronaut’s Windlass:

I want moar!

The Aeronaut’s Windlass is the first volume in Jim Butcher’s new series, The Cinder Spires.  It’s got airship battles.  It’s got bravery and derring-do.  It’s got nefarious sneak attacks and villains you’ll love to hate.  It’s got dueling.  I like dueling.  (I think we should bring it back.  One way or another, there would be fewer a******* wandering about mucking up the place.)

In short, it was a whole heck of a lot of fun.  Here’s the setup. Continue reading →

Relive the Vietnam War in Of Bone and Thunder

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21412311Of Bone and Thunder
Chris Evans
Simon and Schuster
mmpb $9.99, ebook $8.99

Of Bone and Thunder is a dark, graphic, gripping military fantasy, with dragons, dwarves, and a great deal of combat. But that’s not what the book is about.

It’s about Vietnam.

That’s not any big surprise to anyone who has read the cover copy. I read somewhere that a science fiction novel deals with three times periods, the one in which it is set, the one in which it was written, and the time period that it’s actually about. I’d like to modify that, with apologies to whomever said it, to a fantasy novel deals with three worlds: the one in which it’s set, the one in which it’s written, and the one in which it’s about. This novel is about what it was like to be a soldier in the Vietnam War. Continue reading →

Kuttner Unkollected: “A God Named Kroo”

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$(KGrHqZ,!i4E8VDJi4qGBPHe1IuBYQ~~60_35“A God Named Kroo”
Henry Kuttner
Thrilling Wonder Stories, Winter 1944, p. 13-43

Henry Kuttner was one of the most prolific science fiction and fantasy authors who wrote for the pulps in the 1940s, although he didn’t limit himself to those genres.  The winter 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories is an example.  He has three stories in this issue.  The one given top billing on cover is what we’ll look at today.  Oddly, the illustration is for a story not listed on the cover, “Venusian Nightmare” by Oscar J. Friend writing as Ford Smith.

The second story of Kuttner’s is “Trophy” as by Scott Morgan.  This wasn’t one of Kuttner’s more common pen names.  I’ll be looking at it on Futures Past and Present in a day or so.  The third story, “Swing Your Lady”, is bylined Kelvin Kent and is part of Kuttner’s Pete Manx series.  Haffner Press is going to reprint this one in a collection of Kuttner’s stories under his Kelvin Kent pseudonym, so I’ll hold off on reviewing that one.

Kroo was once a powerful, if minor, Tibetan deity.  He enjoyed worship, human sacrifices, the whole nine yards.  Now his only follower is a yak that wandered into his temple grounds one night looking for a place to graze.  As you might can guess, this isn’t going to be a serious story.  Kuttner was known for his dry and often sardonic sense of humor, and it’s on display here. Continue reading →

Kuttner Unkollected

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9630457No, that’s not a typo, it’s a deliberate misspelling.  It’s a weisenheimer attempt at alliteration.

About a decade ago, give or take a year, I had a little extra money from summer teaching.  So did I save the money or invest it wisely?  No, I didn’t.  I decided to try and obtain as many copies of Henry Kuttner stories that had never been reprinted at that time that I didn’t have, along with a few other unreprinted stories by people such as Eric Frank Russell.  Except for some copies of Weird Tales which were out of my price range, I managed to get most everything I didn’t have copies of.  Haffner Press has reprinted the Weird Tales material.  When pursuing a project like this, eBay is not your bank account’s friend an invaluable tool.   Continue reading →

Manly Wade Wellman’s Kardios of Atlantis

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swords against darkness“Straggler From Atlantis”
Swords Against Darkness
Andrew J. Offutt, ed.
mmpb, Zebra Books, 1977, $1.95

In the late 1970s, Manly Wade Wellman began a series of novelettes about the last survivor of Atlantis, a warrior bard named Kardios. Or at least he began publishing them in the late 1970s. In his introduction to “Straggler from Atlantis”, Adrew Offutt says that Wellman tried to publish them in the 1930s, but some other chap was writing about an Atlantean named Kull at the time and no editor was buying.

Be that at it may, the Kardios stories were published, although to the best of my knowledge, they’ve never been collected in book form. The ISFDB shows a total of five, with the first four appearing in the first four volumes of Swords Against Darkness and the final one in an anthology from DAW books with the generic title of Heroic Fantasy. Continue reading →

Report on Howard Days, Part 2: Saturday

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Things started a little later on Saturday than they did on Friday.  I slept late (or what passes for late for me), showered, went into Cross Plains, and joined some folks for breakfast.  After some good conversation, I toodled over to the pavilion and hung out there for a while.20150613_092954

The first panel (all panels where held in the library) was another great discussion.  Entitled “A Means to Freedom”, Rusty Burke led the conversation about the correspondence between Lovecraft and Howard.  The general consensus was that it was a good thing the internet wasn’t around in those days, or the two men would never have gotten any fiction written. Continue reading →

I am a Man; I’m not a Bot

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I couldn’t resist; the muse the Devil Vox Day my medication the Illuminati Tor Books made me write this:

I am a man; I’m not a bot,
Even though that’s what you thought.
You loudly yell that I am racist,
Such a statement has no basis.
That I discriminate by gender,
(For which your evidence is slender.)
And that word you use for “fear”,
I doubt your understanding’s clear.
But the part that’s most offensive,
and should make you apprehensive,
to neo-nazis you compare me,
and I might add, quite unfairly.
And so I’ll take my books by Tor,
And I’ll toss them out the door.

Envisioning the Feminine Future

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Feminine FutureThe Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers
Mike Ashley
Dover Thrift Editions
ebook and print both $4.50
Amazon B&N

So in a previous post, I wrote about forgotten women writers from the early days of the science fiction pulps.  While I was reading Partners in Wonder (the book under discussion in that post), I came across a review of The Feminine Future.  Several of the stories in the latter were specifically singled out by Eric Leif Davin in the former.

I immediately picked it up.  It didn’t cover quite the same ground as Partners in Wonder, which looked at women authors in the early pulps.  In other words, the time period it was concerned with began in 1926, when Hugo Gernsback launched the first pulp devoted entirely to science fiction, Amazing Stories.

Science fiction had of course existed long before then, although it was called scientific romance.  (I find it interesting that scientific romances were considered respectable, science fiction was, and at times still is, viewed as trash.)  Mike Ashley doesn’t confine himself to the pulp era.  He gathers stories from women writers going back to the popular fiction magazines of the late 1800s.

Here’s what the book includes: Continue reading →