Category: Critical Mass News

A Night in the Lonesome October
is a delightful fantasy novel by Roger Zelazny published in 1993, near the end of his life. It was his last book, and I must shamefully admit that I hadn’t read it until recently. The story is narrated as a series of diary entries for the month of October by the dog, Snuff (bottom right on the cover), who is the animal companion of (we presume) Jack the Ripper.  It is set in an October where there is a full moon on Halloween, a time when the Elder Gods try to cross a portal into our universe.
A game is played out between the Openers and the Closers, who gather in the month of October near the location of the portal (the exact position of which must be calculated  during the month).
The cast of characters includes The Great Detective, the Count, the Good Doctor and his Mechanical Man, Larry Talbot, a Witch, a mad Pastor, a Russian Hermit, perhaps some Grave Robbers. As our hero interacts with the animal companions/familiars of the players, we learn more about the players and which side they’re on. A delightful Victorian gothic fantasy romp, gorgeously illustrated by Gahan Wilson, this is some of the best Zelazny has done. Worth buying just for the graveyard scene, where various players trade body parts — others, not their own.

Note that this year in Australia, Halloween will be the night of a Black Moon — the second new moon in a month!

Dimension X: Adventures in Time & Space is a compendium of a dozen episodes of the radio programmes, featuring dramatisations of classic SF stories from the 50s. It’s a nice clean recording, complete with newsbreaks such as the declaration of war between North and South Korea.

Worth a listen to realise how SF has grown, and how time-bound many SF stories have become. Includes some classics which have become clichés.

Contains: The Outer Limit, by Graham Doar; Jack Williamson’s With Folded Hands;  Report on the Barnhouse Effect by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr;  George Leffert’s No Contact; Frederick Brown’s Knock; Robert Bloch’s Almost Human; Murray Leinster’s The Lost Race; Donald A Wollheim’s The Embassy; Robert Heinlein’s The Green Hills of Earth;  an adaptation/preview of the George Pal film of Heinlein’s Destination Moon; Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains / Zero Hour;  Murray Leinster’s A Logic named Joe; Ray Bradbury’s Mars is Heaven; George Lefferts’ The Man in the Moon;  and Villiers Gerson’s Beyond Infinity.  In short, the first sixteen episodes of the show, originally broadcast from April to July, 1950. Listening to the series I can’t help noticing the underlying paranoia in many of the stories, possibly a result of the cold war. Despite that, it’s a good collection of stories.

A personal list for October 1st of SF films worth watching!

• Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)
• Metropolis (1927, as restored)
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• The Man in the White Suit
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
• Fifth element (1997)
• War of the Worlds (Geo Pal, 1953)
• A Clockwork Orange (1971)
• Blade Runner (1982)
• District 9
• Charly (1968) (Flowers for Algernon)
• Alien (1979)
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
• Forbidden Planet (1956)
• Dark City  (1998)
• A Scanner Darkly (2006)
• Minority Report (2002)
• Attack the Block (2011)
• Inception (2010)
• Dark Star (1975)
• Alphaville (1965)
• The Andromeda Strain (1971)
• The Time Machine (1960)

Rolling Stone recently published a list of their all-time best TV shows.

Just for fun, see if you can name these shows which are on the list.

Answers: Torchwood, AstroBoy, Firefly, Quatermass Experiment, Utopia, Star Trek Next Gen, Dollhouse, Black Mirror, Outer Limits (Demon with a Glass Hand),  Star Trek (The Trouble with Tribbles), Quatermass and the Pit, Orphan Black, X-Files, Fringe, Buffy, Dr Who, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica (remake), The Prisoner

Take a trip down the Einstein Highway where the course of mighty rivers can be changed, journey into space travelling the universe with Speed King, King of Space, Rocky Starr, and Captain Miracle, passing beyond the stars on to the conquest of time itself, and, on the day of the triffids, be menaced by Man, Mark 2.

These were the worlds of science fiction broadcast on radio in nineteen-fifties Australia. You too can be exposed to the radioactivity of the air waves. Only scattered fragments in the fading memories of one who was there and heard too much. This is your chance to catch a few rays.

Quick audio quiz:

• Which hardboiled detective has been dealing with angels in Chicago?
  The Angel’s Kiss by Melodie Malone is the book the Doctor was reading when he and Amy and Rory were sitting in Central Park at the beginning of The Angels Take Manhattan. The book has been properly completed, and was released as a BBC audiobook, read by Alex Kingston. So the answer is Melodie Malone/Alex Kingston
• Which series is set in a world where disputes are settled by duels, often fought by professional swords for hire?
  Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint trilogy
  
• What radio serial is connected by the London tube stations? (Hint: not Mornington Crescent.)
  It is, of course, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. It started out as a 6-part TV series, followed by a novelisation, audio book, complete extended edition novel. It’s also appeared as a comic written by Mike Carey. In 2010 it became a hit stage play for Chicago’s Lifeline Theatre. March 2013 saw an all-star radio adaptation by BBC 4

  

• Who are the Android Sisters and how are they connected to PK Dick?
  Two frankies (androids) who appear in the first Ruby radio series, singing songs including Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?, the title of the PK Dick novel made into the film Bladerunner.
• Name two australian podcasts which have been nominated for Hugo and/or world fantasy awards. Galactic Suburbia, The Coode St Podcast, The Writer and the Critic were all nominated for fancast Hugos in 2014; Galactic Suburbia won in 2015.

Roman’s giving a quick overview of the state of audio SF: audiobooks, radio plays and podcasts. With a few carefully chosen examples, he hopes to persuade you that there are unseen riches in there valleys. After all, special effects are a lot cheaper!

Come along and find out what’s happened since HitchHiker’s!

Quick audio quiz:

• Which hardboiled detective has been dealing with angels in Chicago?
• Which series is set in a world where disputes are settled by duels, often fought by professional swords for hire?
• What radio serial is connected by the London tube stations? (Hint: not Mornington Crescent.)
• Who are the Android Sisters and how are they connected to PK Dick?
• Name two australian podcasts which have been nominated for Hugo and/or world fantasy awards.

• Something Happened Here, But We’re Not Quite Sure What It Was
  

  Paul McAuley   Wed Jul 20, 2016 9:00am
  • original fiction  edited by Ellen Datlow
  Science Fiction || a complex sf story about politics and xenophobia when human colonists on an Earth-like planet are faced with the possibility of reaching out to alien cultures, especially when a big organization that has previously done harm is in charge of the operation.

• Once More Into the Abyss

  Dennis Danvers     Wed Jul 13, 2016 9:00am

  • original fiction   edited by Ellen Datlow
  Science Fiction || the last of three novelettes about Stan, whose parents claimed to be aliens and either perished or went home via an abyss in the middle of New Mexico. Stan is drawn back to the Abyss when his wife is offered a job there studying alien artifacts. So Stan and his family (wife, son, brother and three dogs) take a road trip.

• Sic Semper, Sic Semper, Sic Semper

  Douglas F. Warrick  Wed Jul 6, 2016 9:00am

  • original fiction  edited by Ann VanderMeer
  Science Fiction, Time Travel || In the hollowed-out skull of the sixteenth President of the United States, a miserable time traveler builds a modest studio apartment and isolates himself from his own time, his own space, his own species, and his own past. But when gruesome reminders of his life prior to intracranial habitation begin appearing in his freshly constructed apartment, the time traveler is forced to either contend with his memories or, failing that, to run further away from them.

Next year, Saga Press will publish all six of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels in one volume, to mark the 50th anniversary of the fantasy series. The Books of Earthsea will be the first fully illustrated edition, with the cover and both colour and black-and-white interior illustrations (including chapter headings, full-page illustrations, and smaller pictures) by Charles Vess. On her blog (http://ursulakleguin.com/Blog2016.html#116BBEarthsea) Ursula K LeGuin reveals that she’s excited about working with Charles Vess, but a little nervous when Charles sends her a preliminary sketch of a dragon:

It is an excellent dragon. But it isn’t an Earthsea dragon.

Why?

Well . . . an Earthsea dragon wouldn’t have this, see? but it would have that . . . And the tail isn’t exactly right, and about those bristly things —

So I send Charles an email full of whines and niggles and what-if-you-trieds-such-and-suches. I realize how inadequate are my attempts to describe in words the fierce and beautiful being I see so clearly.

Brief pause.

The dragon reappears. Now it looks more like an Earthsea dragon.

But still, it wouldn’t have this here, but it would have something there . . . And about its eye . . . And about those bristly things, you know, don’t they make it very male? and dragon gender is really mysterious . . . .

And so on — more nitpicking, more whimpering, more what-ifs and inadequate efforts to describe.

Patient as Job, grimy with graphite, Charles responds with further dragons, ever more graceful and powerful, ever closer to my heart’s desire . . . and his too, I hope.

Vess has published some sketches on his facebook site: https://www.facebook.com/charles.vess.71/media_set?set=a.10154311507649715.1073741965.623344714&type=3&pnref=story, including the wrap-around cover

Storybundle has a special offer on an historical fantasy collection curated by Melissa Scott.

In this collection I’ve been able to bring together an extraordinary group of writers who draw their inspiration from Western history, in periods from Ancient Egypt through the Second World War. There are classics like the World Fantasy Award-nominated Lord of the Two Lands and the Nebula-nominated Death of the Necromancer, and newer novels like Daughter of Mystery and The Emperor’s Agent— and Stag and Hound, just released in April. What these novels have in common, across these very different periods, is a depth to and delight in their worlds, in the precise detail and pitch-perfect moment that not only propels the story, but makes it utterly, dazzlingly real.
— Melissa Scott in her introduction to the bundle

Perhaps my favourite (not just for the title) is Geonn Cannon’s The Virtuous Feats of the Indomitable Miss Trafalgar and the Erudite Lady Boone. Just consider this excerpt:

In London’s alleys and byways she learned how to steal, how to fight, how to use magic, and how to avoid being detected by the police. Her hands were quick, her mind quicker, and she quickly started earning her keep with the other thieves and hoodlums occupying London’s demimonde.

Her life changed the day she noticed Dorothy Boone out for a stroll. She was walking briskly, her clothes indicating a modest salary but there was no denying she was wealthy. Her shabbiness was far too contrived to be real, and she wore a pocket watch that anyone truly destitute would have pawned ages ago. Beatrice followed at a safe distance until she discovered the woman’s residence. She waited until Dorothy left again, then found a way inside.

It was the mother lode. Even before she discovered the armory, before she even knew there was a second or third wing to the home, she was trying to figure out which antiques she could carry away and which she would have to come back for later. She sincerely hoped there would be a later. Artifacts, artwork, an array of gewgaws she couldn’t begin to identify… Part of her feared that the things she saw were invaluable, which would be useless if she couldn’t find someone willing to buy them from her.

She was still doing reconnaissance when she picked up what looked like an ordinary stone tablet to see what was inscribed on the face of it. Her lips formed the unusual words carved on the face of it as she tried to make sense of it. It was a moment before she realized her arms had become unusually stiff, and her body had acquired a new weight that made her feel anchored to the floor. She managed to unfold her arms to put the tablet down, but the damage had already been done. Her legs wouldn’t move her farther than a few steps, and her hands froze on the way up so she could see the gray stone spreading across her flesh.

The bundle is available until August 10th or thereabouts.