Sweet Freedom

Friday, June 15, 2012

FFB: Robert Bloch: COLD CHILLS; Alfred Bester: STARLIGHT; Fritz Leiber: SHIP OF SHADOWS

Cold Chills, Starlight, and the contents rather than an actual copy of Ship of Shadows all found me at pretty much the same time...in 1978...and as the most recent collections (at least of recent work) by each of the past masters in question, they meant a lot to me, both as appreciations of their authors' work and as encouragement to continue engaging with the fields they were so integral to.

The Bloch, for example, despite the awful Leisure Books package (the original Doubleday hardcover was little better than functional, but at least was more presentable), gathers some of his most important short fiction (such as the gentle fantasy "The Movie People" and the vicious suspense story "The Animal Fair" and the straight-up, if heavily metaphorical, science fiction I gather Bloch was most proud of among his efforts in that mode, "The Learning Maze"--though certainly "How Like a God" is comparable work) along with solid entertainments (such as the joke-story with some heft to it, "The Gods Are Not Mocked"...Bloch on bumper-sticker culture might well be extended to retweets, or the horror story "Double Whammy" which might remind you of the film Drag Me to Hell done better and more succinctly as well as decades earlier). Bloch himself seems a bit uncomfortable with the final story, "The Model," an unusually sexually graphic, for Bloch, sfnal horror story..."The Girl from Mars" made more explicit (and I wonder if the unmentioned echo of that earlier story might've bothered him at least as much as being so uncharacteristically on the, um, nose).

Alfred Bester's Starlight was a Science Fiction Book Club omnibus which quite sensibly combined two slender Berkley/Putnam collections, and under a less tired title than either of the original volumes. More a career retrospective (and the only one published during Bester's lifetime) than today's other books, this collection included examples of Bester as nonfiction writer (including a version of his highly engaging autobiographical essay) as well as such brilliant, affecting short fiction as "5,271,009" and "They Don't Make Life Like They Used To" (as well as his most famous short story, "Fondly Fahrenheit"...as with his first two sf novels, I rank this a notch below his best short fiction, but mine is definitely a minority opinion there). From his earliest fiction, we get the also brilliant-in-concept "Adam and No Eve" and the similarly promising and breakneck-paced, if a bit goofier, "Hell is Forever"; from his late work, such a fine example as "The Four-Hour Fugue" (two notches ahead of even his best late novels).

The Leiber is perhaps an unfair comparison, here...it's one brilliant story after another, with no simply good or interesting examples mixed in, but this is hardly Leiber's fault, nor any disservice to the reader (as the hardcover's subtitle notes, "The Award-Winning Stories of Fritz Leiber"--in this case, the Hugo and Nebula awards for sf and fantasy). Reaching back as far as his novella The Big Time, really a play in prose form as such critics as Algis Budrys were quick to note (with a punning title harkening to vaudeville as much as time travel and destiny), and otherwise gathering much of the best of his shorter work over the previous decade (or certainly his most widely-hailed shorter work...most with strong autobiographical aspects, and none moreso than the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story which is in part a memorial to his recently-late wife, Jonquil, though the title-story also deals with the alcoholic spiral her death occasioned for him), the book simply is as good an introduction to Leiber as one could ask for...something also true of the Bester, for the most part, and not quite true of the Bloch, but one could do worse. So...a core sampling of the late career for Bloch, a measure of the range of short work by Bester, and the popular as well as artistic cream of Leiber (reduction of Leiber?) in that period. One could do a lot worse than any of these.

The Contento indices:
Cold Chills Robert Bloch (Doubleday, 1977, hc); Also in pb (Leisure).
· Introduction · in
· The Gods Are Not Mocked · ss Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine Aug ’68
· How Like a God · ss Galaxy Apr ’69
· The Movie People · ss The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (or F&SF) Oct ’69
· Double Whammy · ss Fantastic Feb ’70
· In the Cards · ss Worlds of Fantasy Win ’70
· The Animal Fair · ss Playboy May ’71
· The Oracle · ss Penthouse May ’71
· The Play’s the Thing · ss Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine May ’71
· Ego Trip · ss Penthouse Mar ’72
· Forever and Amen · ss And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire, ed. Roger Elwood, Chilton, 1972
· See How They Run · ss EQMM Apr ’73
· Space-Born · nv Children of Infinity, ed. Roger Elwood, Watts, 1973
· The Learning Maze · ss The Learning Maze, ed. Roger Elwood, Messner, 1974
· The Model · ss Gallery Nov ’75

Starlight Alfred Bester (Nelson Doubleday, 1976, hc)
· The Light Fantastic · ed. Alfred Bester · co Berkley/Putnam, 1976
· 5,271,009 · nv F&SF Mar ’54
· Ms. Found in a Champagne Bottle · ss Status, 1968
· Fondly Fahrenheit · nv F&SF Aug ’54
· Comment on “Fondly Fahrenheit” · ar
· The Four-Hour Fugue · ss Analog Jun ’74
· The Men Who Murdered Mohammed · ss F&SF Oct ’58
· Disappearing Act · ss Star Science Fiction Stories #2, ed. Frederik Pohl, Ballantine, 1953
· Hell Is Forever · na Unknown Aug ’42
· Star Light, Star Bright · ed. Alfred Bester · co Berkley/Putnam, 1976
· Adam and No Eve · ss Astounding Sep ’41
· Time Is the Traitor · nv F&SF Sep ’53
· Oddy and Id [“The Devil’s Invention”] · ss Astounding Aug ’50
· Hobson’s Choice · ss F&SF Aug ’52
· Star Light, Star Bright · ss F&SF Jul ’53
· They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To · nv F&SF Oct ’63
· Of Time and Third Avenue · ss F&SF Oct ’51
· Isaac Asimov · iv Publishers Weekly Apr 17 ’72 [Isaac Asimov]
· The Pi Man · ss Star Light, Star Bright, Berkley/Putnam, 1976; revised from F&SF Oct ’59.
· Something Up There Likes Me · nv Astounding, ed. Harry Harrison, Random House, 1973
· My Affair with Science Fiction · ar Nova 4, ed. Harry Harrison, Walker, 1975

Ship of Shadows Fritz Leiber (Gollancz, 1979, hc)
· Ship of Shadows · na F&SF Jul ’69
· Catch That Zeppelin! · nv F&SF Mar ’75
· Gonna Roll the Bones · nv Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967
· Ill Met in Lankhmar [Fafhrd & Gray Mouser] · na F&SF Apr ’70
· Belsen Express · ss The Second Book of Fritz Leiber, DAW Books, 1975
· The Big Time [Change War] · n. Galaxy Mar ’58 (+1); New York: Ace Books, 1961

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Tuesday's Overlooked Films And/Or Other A/V: more links

Thanks to all contributors, and to you readers, for the reviews and citations at the links below...as frequently, a few more might be added over the course of the day (and if I've missed yours or someone else's, please let me know).
Bill Crider: The Midnight Man [trailer/tv ad]

Brett McKee: Biggest Disappointments Of The 2011-12 Television Season

Brian Arnold: Jaws 2

Elisabeth Grace Foley: First Love (1939 film)

Evan Lewis: Batman (1943 serial film)

George Kelley: Alien & Aliens Special Edition

Iba Dawson: Suspicion (1941)

Ivan Shreve, Jr.: The Green Hornet (1940 film serial)

Jack Seabrook: Robert Bloch on Television: "The Second Wife" (The Alfred Hitchcock Hour)

James Reasoner: Battle of the Bulge

Jerry House: My Little Margie (tv)

John Charles: The Starlost

Juri Nummelin: Jacob's Ladder

Kate Laity: Down with Love

Marty McKee: A Man Called Sledge

Michael Shonk: The Hunter (1952-54 television)

Mike Tooney: UFO: "The Square Triangle"

Patti Abbott: Eyewitness (1981 film)

Prashant Trikannad: The Circus (1928)

Randy Johnson: Cowboy Bebop

Rod Lott: The Pyjama Girl Case

Ron Scheer: Thunder Over the Plains

Samuel Wilson: Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man

Scott Cupp: Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine

Sergio Angelini: Dead Bang

Todd Mason: Home (2008 film); ska documentaries

Yvette Banek: Mouse Hunt

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Saturday Music Club: Ska documentaries

History of Jamaican Music: From Ska to Reggae to Dancehall Music (Part 1)

(Part 2)

(Part 3)

This Is Ska! (1964)
Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Friday, June 8, 2012

FFB: THE BEST AMERICAN EROTICA 1993 edited by Susie Bright (Simon and Schuster)

Contents, courtesy William Contento's Miscellaneous Anthologies site:
The Best American Erotica 1993 ed. Susan Bright (Simon & Schuster, 1993; S&S's paperback reprint: Touchstone Books 0-684-84514-8, Apr ’97, $17.95, 244pp, tp); (Contents from www.susiebright.com)

· I Have Something for You · Blake C. Aarens · ss

· from Vox · Nicholson Baker · ex New York: Random House, 1992

· Horny · Greg Boyd · ss

· Belonging · Pat Califia · ss

· from “Citre et Trans” · Samuel R. Delany · ex Driftglass/Starshards, Grafton, 1993

· Milk · Michael Dorsey · ss

· Why · Bob Flanagan · ss

· Ninety-Three Million Miles Away · Barbara Gowdy · ss

· Serenade for Female with Fantasies · Ann Marie Mardith · ss

· Five Dimes · Melissa [Anita Melissa Mashman] · ss

· Rubenesque · Magenta Michaels · ss

· Needless to Say · Lisa Palac · ss

· Golden Boy · Carol Queen · ss

· from The Tale of the Body Thief · Anne Rice · ex New York: Knopf, 1992

· Brian’s Bedroom · Leigh Rutledge · ss

· Two at Once · Robert Silverberg · ss Penthouse Letters, 1992

· The Flood · Ronald Sukenick · ss

· Me and the Boys · Trish Thomas · ss

· Ellen, from Chicago · Pat Williams · ss

· Griffs, on a Rainy Sunday in L.A. · Carter Wilson · ss

This was the first of sexual-matters commentator and On Our Backs magazine all-but-co-founder Susie Bright's annual series, which would see fourteen more volumes before wrapping up with the 2008 volume (having skipped a year), the last volume both a best of its previous year and a survey of the best of the previous volumes. [***Not quite, as my late-night memory played me false...as Bright notes in comments, below, the non-series-retrospective fiction in the last volume was original to the anthology...a tack taken by a number of the other "best-of" annuals, particularly but not exclusively in the erotica field.] (And On Our Backs was the first skin/sexuality magazine, or at least the first sustained one, to be aimed squarely at the lesbian reader, taking its title in gentle mockery of the DC-based feminist newspaper Off Our Backs.) The flood of annual and vaguely/possibly annual best-of volumes in the erotica field since 1993 owes something to the entry of Bright and S&S into virgin territory.

And this was a solid first go. The Anne Rice excerpt was about as unimpressive as all the Rice fiction I'd ever sampled (or have since), but the variety and grace (or its antithesis when desired) of the rest of the contents made for a memorable read, even with such stories as the Silverberg, an account of a not quite successful multipartner tryst, being wry or otherwise amusing even when not at all arousing...Bright was seeking a broad-spectrum approach, figuring the strength of her contributors' work would make for good reading even when the sexual exploration of a given piece might not do much for a given reader's libido...and that readers might be surprised to respond to a work where the passion in the telling transcended the lack of lust inspired by the type of sexual encounter described. I was already familiar with the work of Silverberg, Delany, Rice, and Sukenick as fiction-writers, and had heard of but not read Baker thus; Lisa Palac and Pat Califia I knew better for various sorts of nonfiction (Palac mostly from MaximumRocknRoll magazine), and Bob Flanagan as the subject of others' nonfiction (a man in constant pain from cystic fibrosis, he embraced and magnified his pain, became mildly famous as a "super-masochist" and explorer of the limits of that kind of lifestyle). The others were completely new to me; Gowdy and "Melissa" certainly made an impression, even if their work here wasn't up to the very best Bright would highlight in future volumes, such as William Harrison's gentle yet fervent "Two Cars in a Cornfield" (he of "Roller Ball Murder", the Esquire short story that is vastly better than either film made from it) or Clean Sheets and Slow Trains editor Susannah Indigo's several contributions. A. M. Homes and Dagoberto Gilb, Marge Piercy and Zane, Poppy Brite and Jerry Stahl, Chuck Palahniuk and Vaginal Cream Davis and Dorothy Allison and Cecelia Tan would appear in future volumes, and now Bright is back in the game, after a few years' interregnum, with her old friend Rachel Kramer Bussel, editing the Best Sex Writing annual. All to the good, because even the fine work of Bussel on her own or of Maxim Jakubowski, who edits both crime-fiction and erotica annuals for Robinson in the UK and (after the collapse of Carroll and Graf) Running Press in the US haven't lessened my feeling the absence the foremother of all the plethora of randy children (such annuals as the Best Women's Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, etc.) in the best-of series arena, which might or might not catch another inflow of intrigued readers in the afterglow of the most recent erotic-fiction bestsellers.

For more of today's book selections, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Friday, June 1, 2012

FFB: Margaret Millar week...books in progress...reviewer in retrograde...

This is Margaret Millar Friday in our weekly readathon, yet it has also been a week wracked with dental misadventure, attempts to work around and ahead of minor surgery that has yet to fully happen, and generally the kind of week where I've been taking massive doses of ibuprofen and sleeping accordingly (not only my best analgesic but my best sleep aid...the supposedly stronger stuff I've also been prescribed as usual is less effective at controlling pain, but does have an unpleasantly distorting effect on my dream sleep, something a work colleague has noted with her own recent experience with the similar opiates after scratching her corneas; at least I'm not as sensitive as my father, who can go off into waking hallucination with relatively low doses of poppy-stuff...something inattentive hospital staff keep rediscovering for him on occasion, despite instruction in advance, when he's needed some not so minor surgery of his own).

It's also been a week where we've lost some impressive people, not least of course the singer and guitar pioneer Doc Watson...the reading (by James Earl Jones) and presentation (with limited animation and music) of Why Mosquitos Buzz in People's Ears: A West African Tale (Dial Press, 1975), a 1976 Caldecott winner for reteller Verna Aardema and the brilliant illustrators Diane and the late Leo Dillon, is eminently worth seeing and hearing.

So, books that have not yet been finished, despite attempts to get them in on time:

Margaret Millar, The Listening Walls (Random House, 1959). The Millars I had already were all, it turns out, in storage...and I hadn't yet read this, not one of her more obscure titles (and James Reasoner has reviewed it today; Juri Nummelin did so a while back). I've still barely begun it...despite the proprietor at The Title Page noting that it terrified her as a college student upon first reading it.

Sharon Jarvis, editor, Inside Outer Space (Frederick Ungar 1985). An anthology of (then-)new essays by writers and editors about the art and business of science fiction and fantasy writing...one which almost unaccountably got by me in the mid-'80s (or at least I have no memory of seeing it nor seeing it reviewed)...including a sadly informed (the hardest way) essay by the late George Alec Effinger about his gathering troubles with health, medical bills and the IRS and how to hope to avoid such, and a range of interesting folks represented (from Ron Goulart through Stuart David Schiff to Marion Zimmer Bradley and Jarvis herself) who haven't often been tapped for this kind of volume, at least when put together, as several important ones were, by R. Bretnor.

Brenda Knight, Women of the Beat Generation (Conart Press, 1996) is similarly a survey of people who mostly haven't had the attention they deserve, particularly when compared even to the minor male Beat writers and hangers-on. Diane di Prima and Jane Bowles and just maybe Hettie Jones are in relatively little danger of being forgotten by at least some of the larger audience of their kind of art, but entirely too many other folks, certainly the writers, had their only work in print a decade and a half ago in this small-press volume...itself, despite picking up the then-dwindling American Book Award in 1997, not too robustly in print now.

Stephen Jones, editor, The Monster Book of Zombies (a 2009 rebranded instant-remainder edition of the Robinson/Carroll & Graf 1993 The Mammoth Book of Zombies) features some of the best work dealing with the creatures who are just beginning to commercially cool on the book market, even as the cooling or warmly-rotting undead ghouls themselves are being supplemented by a recent rash of too-similar true-crime stories over the last week or so. This volume, unlike such even earlier anthologies as Bill Pronzini's Voodoo! (please see below), is largely comprised of fiction newly-published in the 1993 edition, by the brilliant likes of Kim Newman and Nicholas Royle, alongside chestnuts (Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar") and otherwise largely inaccessible work (Robert Bloch's fine novella "The Dead Don't Die!", which should always be reprinted with Virgil Finlay's illustrations from its original publication in Fantastic Adventures, which cast Bloch himself in the role of the protagonist).

(I see I am quoted, probably from the librarian-heavy discussion list Fiction-L, without credit along with others at one YALSA database:

"I would point him toward John Skipp and Craig Spector's anthology BOOK OF THE DEAD, which is one of the initial tributes to George Romero-style zombie apocalypses in literature, featuring most of the best writers drawn to that sort of thing...many if not most of those stories were reprinted in the first three anthologies I mention, but BOOK OF THE DEAD and its sequel anthology STILL DEAD are among the best work I've encountered that fits the bill you lay out. The collected works of Karl Edward Wagner would be useful for your patron to investigate, as well, I suspect (and perhaps David Drake's, as well)...and he might be suprised how much he likes Fritz Leiber's CONJURE WIFE...and Robert Bloch's "The Dead Don't Die!" among the other stories collected in Stephen Jones's THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF ZOMBIES...which doesn't overlap completely with Bill Pronzini's anthology VOODOO! (also included in the omnibus editions THE ARBOR HOUSE NECROPOLIS and THE BOOK OF THE DEAD--the latter reprinted by an instant remainder house).
THE ARBOR HOUSE NECROPOLIS and THE BOOK OF THE DEAD (two forms of the same omnibus) were also edited by Bill Pronzini...VOODOO! was collected in them (with two other similar anthologies), as well as being published initially on its own.
CONJURE WIFE by Fritz Leiber is inarguably horror, but not science fiction in any meaningful way. It's even been published, by the opportunistic paperback house Award Books at the height of supermarket gothic craze in the latest '60s/early '70s, as a gothic.
David Drake's historical fantasies are also not science-fictional, but much of his Vietnam War-inspired anti-war HAMMER'S SLAMMERS series are indeed sf. I was thinking of the former more than the latter, particularly his zombie stories set in the Vietnam War era.
Octavia Butler's first novel, KINDRED, is almost inarguably horror/fantasy (a time-travel novel with no rational explanation attempted to explain the involuntary time travel/personality swaps), but most of her other work is indeed science-fictional. I haven't yet read CLAY'S ARK, but I suspect that one would be better in the sf column.")

So...I offer this in lieu of my Millar review, for now...with apologies. Please see Patti Abbott's blog for the list of people who actually got their books read.